Ten thousand made the trip every year to look up marriage, death, court, and census documents, as well Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War I records.
But in recent years, as the state created searchable databases of more than one million documents and photographs, many more people are working from home.
A quarter-million visit the State Archives on their computers each year, sometimes getting what they want immediately and other times ordering copies of documents for a fee.
The same is true in Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands use the Internet to explore the state archives in Harrisburg.
The new online visitors are not the professional educators, historians, or genealogists who usually walked through the archives' doors. They're military and history buffs, and homemakers who are checking out their family roots or are just simply curious.
Some use the websites to save time before going to the archives for more specific research of the tens of millions of documents and photos.
But the databases' popularity has reduced visits to both archives. Trenton now has from 7,000 to 8,000 visitors a year. Harrisburg reported a similar decline but had no numbers.
New Jersey's databases "are an essential gateway," said Karl Niederer, director of the state Division of Archives and Records Management. "This will be the way a significant majority of archive users will begin the process of doing their research."
"That's the business model we've adopted," he said. "We're driven by the public's expectation that that's how resources will be made available."
Web availability is especially important to researchers who would otherwise have to travel long distances to look at the records.
"Harrisburg is a long way from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh," said David Haury, director of the Bureau of Archives and History at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
