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Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Helpful Maps at the Princeton University's Nova Cæsarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888

This came from George Farris:

There are a couple of maps that are helpful in determining the locations of the FitzRandolph lands in these transactions at  Maps at Princeton University Library

One of these shows the owners of the land along the Post Road from Amboy to Trenton as of 1766.  There are no FitzRandolphs listed at that time, but there are several properties listed for Thomas Leonard who was a major landholder around Prince Town.  Another set of maps on the same page documents the Middlesex/Somerset County line.  From this it's clear that Prince Town was split between the two counties so that land west of the main road was part of Somerset.  So the two tracts were not very far apart and the larger one was partially bounded by Stony Brook and would now be part of Princeton University.  This would seem to indicate that at least one of the Samuel Bonnells was in the Prince Town area by 1731 and is consistent with the later references to the Bonnells being near Penns Neck - just across Stony Brook from Princeton..

The FitzRandolphs seem to have spread from Woodbridge throughout the region.  There were some around Brunswick and Perth Amboy as well as further south along all of the major roads.  Note that the references to the Kings Road in the 1734 FitzRandolph deeds refer to the post road from Brunswick to Princeton while the previous reference involving the bridge over the South River at what is now Old Bridge, NJ refers to the Amboy-Burlington Road.  These were different branches of the Kings Road through NJ.  Members of the FitzRandolph clan owned land along both of these roads.  Since there were references to Samuel Bonnell involving both of these roads I've wondered whether Samuel, Jr. and Samuel,Sr. might have migrated at different times along different routes.

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