Curators gather South Jersey women’s stories for new book

The stories most at risk of disappearing are often the ones that never sat on a ballot line or a courthouse plaque: the women who kept churches, schools, farms, civic groups and family businesses moving across South Jersey. A new book, Notable Women of South Jersey, is being assembled to pull those scattered histories into one place, with Brittney Ingersoll, curator for the Cumberland County Historical Society, helping lead the Cumberland County side of the effort.

The project is set to include women from all eight South Jersey counties, Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean and Salem. That regional reach matters in Cumberland County, where women’s work has often been preserved in archives, family albums and oral memory rather than in the public record. The book aims to change that by organizing names, achievements and local ties before firsthand memories fade.

Cumberland County already has a framework for that kind of recognition. The Cumberland County Women’s Hall of Fame honors local women of outstanding achievement who have made significant contributions to a profession, the community or women’s issues, and SNJ Today reported in March 2024 that the hall planned a gala honoring four women. South Jersey women have also been featured in Women’s History Month programming, including Mary Treat, an early Vineland resident and naturalist who worked with Charles Darwin on the study of plants, animals and insects. Those examples show how local history can widen when women are named directly instead of left in the margins.

Ingersoll’s role also ties the project to an institution with deep county roots. The Cumberland County Historical Society first organized at a meeting on Dec. 2, 1908, and its collections focus on Cumberland County history from about 1750 to the present. The society also serves as administrator for Potter’s Tavern in Bridgeton and the Old Stone Church in Fairfield, giving it a practical role in preserving the places where local history lives.

That preservation work has already included programming on women and women’s groups in Cumberland County during World War I, along with educational materials on figures such as Mary Merris and Catharine MacCaffray. Taken together, those efforts point to the larger question at the heart of the new book: whose work becomes history, and whose names slip out of public view unless someone deliberately gathers them back?