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.