Not My Grandmother!

When Deeds Tell the Real Story

The hunt for early marriages in Salem County, New Jersey, is never simple. With the 1810 census missing and marriage records scarce, I am left piecing together my family through scattered bits of evidence, tax lists, wills, and the occasional surviving church record. Every clue feels valuable, but none ever seem to tell the whole story.

One of the most stubborn puzzles has been Robert Peterson, my ancestor who lived along Oldmans Creek in what was then Upper Penns Neck Township, Salem County. Robert first appears in local records at the turn of the 19th century, a shoemaker who purchased small parcels of land from familiar neighborhood names like Curry, Pyle, and Barnes.

He married Catherine Simpkins in 1801, and together they had three children: Dean, Ezekiel, and Martha. Their family was part of the tight-knit network of Simpkinses, Pyles, and Guests who lived near Sculltown (now Auburn). But sometime before 1809, Catherine died. A later guardianship petition confirms that Robert was left to care for their children alone.

Image created by ChatGPT (OpenAI), “Handwritten Indenture between Robert and
Elizabeth Peterson, Salem County, New Jersey, 1819,” AI-generated image
based on historical deed style, November 2025.

Then, in 1819, a deed appears showing Robert and his wife Elizabeth Peterson selling property, proof that he had remarried sometime after Catherine’s death. The problem was, no record of that marriage survives. The missing census offered no help, and Salem County’s marriage books for that decade are nearly silent.

So who was Elizabeth?

One promising lead was a widow named Elizabeth Christopher. She lived close to Robert, her husband had died by 1809, and Robert Peterson had served as a witness to that husband’s will. The two families moved in the same circles along Oldmans Creek and were tied to many of the same surnames.

Everything seemed to line up. Same neighborhood. Same family connections. Same time frame. It felt like the perfect fit.

But as every researcher eventually learns, “seems to fit” isn’t proof.

When I began studying the Salem County deed books, the story changed. Over and over, I found this Elizabeth described clearly as the widow of John Christopher, deceased, selling land she had inherited, signing with her mark, and continuing to use her married name year after year. She never once appeared as a Peterson.

Meanwhile, in Robert Peterson’s own transactions from 1809 to 1819, his wife appears simply as Elizabeth Peterson, releasing her dower rights on land sales, but clearly a different person from the widow Christopher. Two women. Two distinct lives.

And then came the reward of all that digging: the deeds not only separated the two women but also revealed the widow’s maiden name, suggesting she belonged to a completely different branch of the Simpkins family.

It felt like a sad victory, sad because it would have been so rewarding to have finally discovered my grandmother’s surname, but a victory because I no longer have to wonder about this Elizabeth. The record is clear. The mystery, at least for her, is solved.

This experience reminded me that land records aren’t just about boundaries or acreage. They’re about identity. They record who people were, spouses, widows, heirs, or neighbors, and when used carefully, they can correct assumptions that have stood for generations.

And in this case, they corrected mine.

She was not my grandmother.

Mapping Robert Peterson’s Neighborhood: How 200-Year-Old Deeds Came to Life with AI

Sometimes, genealogy feels like time travel. A few lines of 200-year-old ink on an old deed can pull you straight into the world of your ancestors, the creeks they crossed, the roads they traveled, even the neighbors they waved to every morning.

That’s exactly what happened when I set out to map Robert Peterson’s neighborhood in early 19th-century Upper Penns Neck Township, now part of Pennsville, Salem County, New Jersey.

Robert Peterson was a cordwainer (shoemaker) who lived and worked near what was then called Sculltown, later renamed Auburn. Between 1799 and 1819, Peterson bought and sold several small tracts of land along the old Penns Neck Road and Pedricktown Road. The deeds mention his neighbors, the Christophers, the Pyles, and the Guests, and with a little patience (and a lot of compass bearings), those cryptic metes-and-bounds started to line up like puzzle pieces.

That’s when I decided to feed the data into an AI-assisted mapping tool to visualize exactly what the area might have looked like around 1805.

The result? A clean, historically styled “Map of Auburn, N.J.”, showing the small parcels where these early tradesmen lived side by side, Robert Peterson the shoemaker, Andrew Pyle the weaver, Ephraim Barnes the carpenter, and John Christopher the neighbor whose land would one day tie the whole story together. (Note: Please comment at the end regarding the accuracy of this map.)

The Deed Data Behind the Map

Below is the data that formed the backbone of the map. Each line was pulled directly from the original Salem County deeds, carefully interpreted to preserve bearings, chains, and links, the surveyor’s language of the early 1800s.

What the Map Reveals

When you stack these deeds together, they form a tight cluster of smallholdings, all fronting the main road and linking to the same set of neighbors. This little cluster was the heart of Sculltown around 1800–1810.

It wasn’t a big town, more like a handful of homesteads where tradesmen worked out of their homes. Shoemaking, weaving, carpentry, and blacksmithing supported nearby farms and travelers heading to Salem or Pedricktown.

Robert Peterson’s shop, for example, almost certainly stood right on the roadside, a modest wooden home with a small “Cordwainer” sign hanging by the door.

Technology Meets Tradition

The AI-generated map helped visualize what early surveyors saw in their minds:

• Roads forming the framework of community life
• Neighbors grouped by trade and kinship
• The old metes-and-bounds giving modern readers a window into how those people lived

But every shape on the map started with you guessed it, dusty handwritten deeds.

Image Credits

• Map of Auburn, N.J. (1799–1818). created by Steve Peterson in collaboration with ChatGPT (OpenAI), 2025.

• Robert Peterson’s Shoemaker Shop, Sculltown (Upper Penns Neck, N.J.), digital historical reconstruction by Steve Peterson with ChatGPT (OpenAI), 2025.

Note on the Accuracy of the Map

The map shown above is a creative reconstruction, not an exact survey. It was designed to visualize how Robert Peterson’s neighborhood might have looked based on available deed descriptions and compass bearings. Every tract, direction, and boundary line is drawn from real data, but early 19th-century deeds often contain approximations and variations that make precise modern plotting impossible.

This map should therefore be viewed as one possible interpretation of the Sculltown (Auburn) landscape, meant to help readers understand relationships among landowners and roads. It is not a definitive or legally accurate survey. The true boundaries likely differed in small but important ways from what we can reconstruct today.

In other words, it’s a tool for storytelling and context, an educated visualization of a real place that has changed shape many times over two centuries.