By Eileen Moon
Photo by Christina Johnson
On October 31, Monmouth County archivist Gary Saretzky will close the door on one chapter in a career that has placed him at the heart of Monmouth County history for the past 25 years.
Since 1994, Saretzky has presided over a collection of government records and historical ar tifacts that are a treasure trove of information spanning more than 400 years of Monmouth County history.
The archives, which are open to the public, contain marriage records, naturalization records, war records, property transfers, court cases, photographs and ephemera that open doors to the past for historians, genealogists and other researchers who turn to the county for help.
Anyone who has attempted to organize their own family archives may have a small inkling of how challenging it must be to organize the records of an entire county.
Fortunately, it’s a job Saretzky was deeply interested in and thoroughly qualified to do.
Saretzky earned a bachelor’s degree in history and master’s in American history with a concentration in archival administration at the University of Wisconsin, where he also worked part time in the manuscripts division of the Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Relocating to his home state of New Jersey, Saretzky took a job with the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. He was the first archivist hired by the organization well-known for administering SAT and GRE examinations and other educational tests.
His role was to compile and organize ETS archives, which involved everything from conducting oral interviews to writing the histories of each testing protocol the organization of fered.
During his years at ETS, Saretzky was appointed to the State Historical Archives Advisory Board, established by Gov. Brendan Byrne in 1975.
In the early 1990s, when Monmouth County Clerk Jane Clayton was seeking professional input in preserving and organizing the county’s vast collection of records, Karl J. Niederer, the state archivist, recommended Saretzky as a consultant.
One of the recommendations Saretzky made following his review was that the county hire a full-time archivist. Clayton offered him the job.
“The first task after I started here was to get the archives open to the public,” Saretzky said. “They had a collection here but it wasn’t set up to handle visitors.”
That changed in August 1994 when the collection opened to the public. The county archive, which is located on the lower level of the Monmouth County Library Headquarters in Manalapan, is now under the direction of Monmouth County Clerk Christine Giordano Hanlon.
Today, more than 1,000 people a year use the archives to do personal or professional research and find information they need. Thanks to the ongoing work of employees and volunteers, much of the county’s collection is searchable online. “We’re constantly scanning records,” Saretzky said. “We use volunteers extensively to help organize and categorize the material. Everybody wants everything digitized overnight but it’s very time-consuming. Last year we actually captured more than a million pages and images.”
The archives include the photo library from the Daily Register newspaper ranging from 1971-1987. Earlier photos from the Register were destroyed in a fire. “We still have over 300,000 photo negatives and color positives,” Saretzky said.
The records are searchable via the indexes the county has created with the help of staff members and volunteers.
“Without these indexes, it would be really tedious to go through these thousands of boxes,” Saretzky said. Among the records indexed online are marriage licenses and immigration documents.
“If you find what you are looking for, (the site) opens up an email to the archive. Then, the archive team will locate the record and copy it at no charge. “It’s a wonderful public service,” Saretzky said.
Saretzky views the creation of the index and the development of the archives’ extensive web presence to be two of the things he is most proud of accomplishing in the past two-and-a-half decades. “We currently have more than 280 different web pages,” he said.
He’s also happy about establishing public events that include the annual Archives and History Day that takes place each October. “Every year now we have about 300 people come,” he said. The event features exhibit tables staffed by members of some 63 organizations engaged in public history in Monmouth County and other counties. “The public can learn about all these different groups and join them if they want,” Saretzky said.
Another event held each spring is Preservation Day, when the county archives branch offers tours of the archives and lectures on historic preservation topics like how to preserve family photos.
The archive also compiles an annual exhibit on some aspect or era in Monmouth County history. Some past exhibits focused on World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The current exhibit is Four Centuries of Monmouth County Women.
In addition to his work with the county archives, Saretzky is an author and photographer who taught history of photography at Mercer County College and coordinated the public history internship program at Rutgers University. He left Rutgers in 2016 after 22 years engaged in placing students in archival internships.
“When I left Rutgers I had more than 800 students, and some of them are now archivists,’’ he said. “That was a very nice experience. I also liked that I was helping young people develop careers in a field that interested me.”
When he began his career in 1969, there were about 1,000 archivists nationwide. Today there are 6,000. It’s a career in demand by a wide range of organizations these days, from corporations like IBM and Disney to sports teams and music groups like the Grateful Dead.
As he reaches the end of his 25 years as Monmouth County archivist, Saretzky admits to feeling a little regretful that 25 years wasn’t long enough to finish the archiving job, but he’s confident the work will continue in good hands.
And although he’ll no longer have a “day job,” his post-retirement schedule is a busy one. He’ll be lecturing on 19th century New Jersey photographers through the New Jersey Council on Humanities. He’ll also continue to write for Garden State Legacy, an online history journal, and will remain engaged as president of the Princeton Preservation Group, which meets four times a year. He’s also writing accompanying content for a book of photos of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
“My plan is to pretty much continue what I’m already doing, but not here,” he said.
