SCOTT ANDERSON/Courier-Post Camden County Surrogate Patricia Egan Jones looks at old wills at her Camden office.

When the Camden County Surrogate's Office relocated most of its records earlier this month weekend of April 12-13, not all were handled by professional movers.

Several cabinets filled with historically significant documents were treated the same way they have been in the past - gingerly.

"Sometimes moving is a wonderful thing. It forces you to reorganize and to look at what you have," said Surrogate Patricia Egan Jones.

Because of a space crunch at the Hall of Justice, where the office has filled about half of the top floor since the building opened 19 years ago, the surrogate's personnel and files have moved a half-block to the 400 block of Federal Street. The old space will be used for an additional courtroom and conference area.

Jones, surrogate for 2 1/2 years, said dismantling the office records was a learning experience for her. As the office's 18 employees prepared bound record books for the move, they discovered cardboard boxes stored on top of cases that hadn't been opened for years.

They had been moved from a basement storage area when that got too cramped and "sealed up a bit and stuck on top of storage cabinets," Jones said. Coated with dust and smelling musty, the documents needed gentle handling because some of their edges were crumbling.

"We came on wills and documents from the 1800s," said Jones. The items had been kept by the Camden County Historical Society, she said, and were returned to the Hall of Justice because the society didn't have room to keep them.

Before the days of typewriters, each will was handwritten into the record books, Jones said.

The flourishes and swirls of the writing in the 1800s are fancy, but difficult to read. Today, employees use computers to enter new information and search for a lot of the old documents. Computerization began in the office in 1995, and Jones hopes they'll soon move to digitalization.

The surrogate is elected countywide and has responsibility for overseeing the estate of every county resident who owns any assets. The surrogate reviews all wills and appoints executors, administrators and guardians for minors. She also administers and invests money held for minor children, usually as the result of court judgments from accidents, and reviews all adoptions.

Wills are not filed with the surrogate before death and there is no statewide will registry. "Before someone dies, the best place for a will is in a safety-deposit box in a bank, or with a lawyer," said Jones.

Eleven days after death, the administrator of the estate can go to the surrogate, with a death certificate, to register the will. The surrogate's office issues documents that permit the administrator to "do the business of the will," which includes paying debts, running a business, if necessary, and making bequests.

"Each will is different. People spell out how they want money distributed, or who gets property. Some administrators have a big job, but most wills are pretty simple," Jones said.

The will itself is placed in a folder and a copy is recorded on microfiche and kept for 10 years. Years ago, Jones said, the wills were forwarded after 10 years to Trenton. "Whatever happened to them there? We're clueless," she said.

The records are public, and often are studied by people on genealogical hunts. The best starting place is the year of an ancestor's death, and his first and last name. A procedure leads the searchers, helped by employees if they're not familiar with the filing system, through steps that end with the actual will, handwritten or typed. Reviewing the documents is a history lesson, Jones said. "They tell you a lot about society at a particular time, how much we've changed, and how much we haven't."

"We're still concerned about our stuff and we think somebody else might want it," she said.

Jones said she hopes, once the office has settled from the move, to install a glass-topped case and display some of the older or more interesting wills, perhaps turning a page in a record book every day or so.

One of the most asked about wills is for poet Walt Whitman, whose will was hand-drafted by the surrogate on Dec. 24, 1891, with instructions about gifts of cash, jewelry and favorite pieces of furniture. He left his home at 328 Mickle St. "absolutely forever" to his brother, Edward, and directed that a sister-in-law be his guardian.

Whitman later changed his mind about some of his bequests and a week later changed the recipient of his gold and silver watches.

A random search led to the will of a Camden man, Daniel Rich, who died in March 1892. Included in a cardboard envelope were documents, including a bill from the funeral director John Crawford, an undertaker and embalmer who had an office at 2637 Westfield Avenue in Camden's Cramer Hill neighborhood.

Embalming services for the decedent cost $10; an oak casket with satin linings and pillow cost $78. It cost $6 for an extra-deep grave, and $1 to rent two dozen chairs for the funeral. Mr. Rich got a new suit for $10, undershirt and drawers for $2, socks and a tie for 25 cents each, and patent leather slippers for $1.25.

The bill was settled in three separate payments by the administrator of his estate.