Rutgers University Biographical Files: Alumni

The Rutgers University Biographical files for alumni contain information about students who graduated from Rutgers between 1770 and 1994. Alexander S. Graham, who headed the Rutgersensia collection in the library in the early twentieth century started the custom of collecting information about alumni and keeping it on file. This practice was continued by his successor, Elizabeth R. Boyd who worked at Rutgers until the mid-1950s. At some point, it appears that their compilation was the duty of the alumni office and that Rutgers employed clipping services to submit information about alumni that appeared in newspapers.

The files themselves include forms filled out by the Rutgers students, newspaper clippings, photographs, correspondence, and material submitted for alumni publications. For some years (the 1920s through the 1950s for example) the files were kept up more regularly. There are less files for individual students starting with the 1960s and ending in 1994. Some alumni have thick files, or even multiple files, where others may contain one sheet of paper. Often, but not always, a biographical file for a student in and after the 1960s is an indication that the student had died—the file consisting of a death notice to the Department of Alumni Relations. As of the mid-1990s, there have been no new biographical files, due in part to any information about alumni being stored electronically. Also sixty feet of biographical files that had been maintained by Alumni Relations were discarded during renovations to Winants hall in the 1990s.

Although the majority of the files were for Rutgers College and University undergraduates on the New Brunswick campus, there are a number of files for graduate level students, female students before 1972, and nongraduates. Also, a person may have attended Rutgers and not have a biographical file. In the cases of some prominent alumni, the biographical files have been integrated into larger collections of their papers (eg, Selman Waksman's papers) or removed to form their own collection. Their names remain on this list with a referral to where the papers are now placed.

A Note about New Jersey College for Women (Later Douglass) Alumnae

Biographical files for alumnae of the New Jersey College for Women (later Douglass College) are not held by Special Collections and University Archives. They are held by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College.

A Note about Alumni and the Rutgers Oral History Archives

Since 1994, the Rutgers Oral History Archives, an ongoing program, has conducted interviews with alumni of Rutgers University and its subsidiary colleges, schools and programs, stretching from the 1910s to the current period, the bulk of which attended in the 1930s through 1960s.

The archives contain transcripts of these interviews. The interviews endeavor to cover each subject's entire life, including memories related to living in New Jersey, involvement at Rutgers, and military and home front perspectives on World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Copies of the tapes and transcripts are available at Special Collections and University archives (see the Guide to the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II), and the transcripts are available online through the Rutgers Oral History Archives Web site. To see the list of interviewees and read their transcripts, go to the Rutgers Oral History Archives Web site. The site can be browsed by name of interviewee, college class, conflict, service branch, military unit, medals, or special topic.

Some veterans who were interviewed for the Oral History Archives also donated material to Special Collections and University Archives. For more information about donors and their materials, see The Guide to the Rutgers University Veterans History Collection, 1942-1995.