Nearly 150 years after a Union Army captain pilfered a book of court records from a county courthouse in Virginia during the Civil War, the Jersey City Free Public Library has returned the 220-year-old spoil of war to its rightful home.

The leather-bound book has a broken binder and the pages are yellowed, but the exhibits the flawless penmanship of John Fox, a Stafford County deputy court clerk who in 1791 was given the task of transcribing summarized court records covering 1749 to 1755.

The small act of Civil War reparations was made this morning in the New Jersey Room of the main library on Jersey Avenue when library officials handed the book to Carl Childs, the director of Local Record Services at the Library of Virginia.

Several months ago John Beekman, assistant manager at Jersey City Free Public Library, found the book in an box while gathering materials to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

"We are happy this piece of history has been found, is still preserved and will be returned to its rightful place," said Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy.

Childs said that so few records remain from Stafford County Court from before the Civil War that the state has classified it as a "catastrophic loss."

"This helps fill one of those holes," Childs said.

Some research revealed how the book found its way to the Jersey City library.

Union Army Capt. William A. Treadwell, of the 4th New York Regiment, took the volume on March 30, 1863 from the Stafford Courthouse in Virginia and shipped it to Boston, and later brought it to Jersey City.

Among the entries in the book:

• A judge's order that a man is paid 50 pounds of tobacco for serving as a witness for two days.

• A lawsuit of an unhappy widow who challenged the decision that she be awarded a dowry of just one-third of her late husband's estate.

• Details of a case in which someone being fined for cursing in church.

The book "is a record of people executing their right through the court system," Childs said. "Sometimes they were successful and sometimes not so successful."

Childs said the book will be copied for the public, before being rebound and restored and kept in the Library of Virginia.