In 1797 a list of "Apprentices and Freedom" was advertised: "Belcher Zachariah rule maker Purchase knife maker Freedom 1797." Zachariah Belcher married Martha Harborne and they have six sons and three daughter who thrive. With the Napoleonic Wars over in Europe and the English Industrial Revolution and the Belcher Rule business underway in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, the state of the economy and the quality of life is at issue as machines have been replacing workers, sowing strife and hardship in England. Zachariah and Martha Belcher make a decision to commit their family to America. Five sons and a married daughter leave Sheffield for New York and New Jersey in the 1820's never to be seen again by their parents or first born, John Belcher, "Iron Man" of the family. This book brings to light my family genealogy as well as a century long family labor in Rule Making to find success and happiness through "Belcher Brothers & Cos." Not all the Belchers and their descendants worked the family business as they follow their own ways to self-actualize beyond the New York City and New Jersey area. My great grandfather was a farmer in Duxbury, Massachusetts and then bookkeeper for Oliver Edes & Son, zinc manufacturers in neighboring Plymouth. My grandfather, Arthur William Belcher, grew up with his siblings in Plymouth, graduating from Harvard College in the Class of 1904 and later earned an M.A. from Colombia returning to the Belcher Brothers home area in Essex County, New Jersey as Principal of Newark, New Jersey's South Side High School 1929-1949.

First series, books 1-43, includes "Notes on U.S. reports" by Walter Malins Rose.

As early as the eighteenth century, New England's ministers were decrying public morality in jeremiads aimed at wayward colonists. Evangelical leaders such as Jonathan Edwards called for rulers to become spiritual as well as political leaders who would renew the people's covenant with God. The prosperous merchant Jonathan Belcher (1682-1757) self-consciously strove to become such a leader, an American Nehemiah. As governor of three royal colonies and early patron of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Belcher became an important but controversial figure in colonial America. An insightful blend of social and political history, this biography demands that Belcher be recognized as the embodiment of the Nehemiah, perhaps as important in his own realm as Cotton Mather was in religious circles. Grappling with the contradictions of Belcher's actions, the author explains much about the complexities of the world in which Belcher lived and wielded influence and, by weaving together social, religious, and cultural history, portrays in the career of Jonathan Belcher a richly detailed synthesis of the tumultuous late colonial period.

First series, books 1-43, includes "Notes on U.S. reports" by Walter Malins Rose.