North Carolina Genealogy

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North Carolina Genealogy Research Guide

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North Carolina Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

North Carolina grew out of the Carolina charters of 1663 and 1665, was settled first from Virginia into the Albemarle region, became a royal colony in 1729, and entered the Union as the twelfth state in 1789. Its genealogical records are overwhelmingly county records — but a long program of collecting has brought the original deeds, wills, estate files, marriage bonds, and court minutes of most counties into the State Archives in Raleigh, so once you have fixed the county, the records are unusually easy to reach.

• Capital: Raleigh, laid out in 1792 as a purpose-built seat of government. The colonial assembly met at Bath, Edenton, and other towns in turn before New Bern became the fixed colonial capital with the building of Tryon Palace in 1770.
• Statehood: November 21, 1789, the twelfth state. A convention at Hillsborough declined to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1788; a second convention, at Fayetteville, ratified it the following year once a bill of rights had been promised.
• Counties: 100. The oldest — Currituck, Chowan, Pasquotank, and Perquimans — began as precincts of Albemarle County in 1668; the last two, Avery and Hoke, were created in 1911.
• Land type: North Carolina is a state-land state, not a federal (public-domain) state. Title passed from the Lords Proprietors, then from the Crown and, in the northern half of the colony, from Earl Granville, and after independence from the State of North Carolina by grant — so there are no federal General Land Office records here. Tracts are described by metes and bounds, and later transfers are recorded as deeds in the county.
• Nickname and motto: the Tar Heel State, long known also as the Old North State; the motto is Esse Quam Videri ("To be, rather than to seem"), adopted in 1893.
• Where records live: deeds, marriages, and births and deaths from 1913 are kept by the county Register of Deeds; probate and civil court records by the Clerk of Superior Court. No city keeps its vital records separately from the rest of the state.

Libraries and Archives

North Carolina's deepest collections sit in Raleigh, where the State Archives holds original county and state records, and in Chapel Hill and Durham, where the universities hold family papers and manuscripts; regional libraries, church archives, and county historical societies hold material for their own areas. The principal repositories include:

• State Archives of North Carolina (Raleigh) — the central repository: original county deed books, wills, estate files, marriage bonds, court minutes, and tax lists, together with colonial records, land grants, and military service and pension records.
• State Library of North Carolina, Government & Heritage Library — published genealogies, county histories, record abstracts, newspapers, city directories, and family files.
• North Carolina Genealogical Society — the statewide society, publisher of the North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal and of guides to the state's records.
• Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — home of the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection: family and plantation papers, diaries, letters, and local histories.
• David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University — manuscripts, family papers, and business and church records, including the Methodist conference archives.
• Joyner Library Special Collections, East Carolina University — manuscripts and local records for eastern North Carolina.
• Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and the North Carolina Room of the Forsyth County Public Library — the strongest public-library genealogy collections in the Piedmont.
• Moravian Archives, Southern Province (Winston-Salem) — the congregational records, diaries, and memoirs of the Wachovia settlements.
• Friends Historical Collection (the Quaker Archives), Guilford College — the archive of North Carolina Yearly Meeting and of most Friends meetings in the region.
• National Archives at Atlanta — federal records for North Carolina, including federal court and naturalization files.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive North Carolina microfilm and digital collections, and county Registers of Deeds, Clerks of Superior Court, public-library local-history rooms, and county historical societies hold records for their own areas.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized North Carolina records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of North Carolina vital, land, probate, court, and church records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive North Carolina vital, census, probate, land, military, and tax collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — North Carolina vital records, censuses, and immigration collections.
• Findmypast ($) — North Carolina passenger, census, and county record collections.
• Fold3 ($) — digitized federal military files, including Confederate and Union service records.
• DigitalNC — free; the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center's newspapers, yearbooks, photographs, county records, and local-history material contributed by libraries and archives across the state.
• North Carolina Digital Collections — free; digitized record series from the State Archives and the State Library, including the 1866 cohabitation records, Confederate pension applications, and the colonial Secretary of State wills.
• North Carolina Land Grant Images and Data — free; the searchable index to the state's land grants, with images of the grant books, surveys, and warrants.
• Documenting the American South — free; the full text of the Colonial and State Records, slave narratives, church and county histories, and regional literature.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized North Carolina histories, published record abstracts, and law books.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

North Carolina's colonial and early state records were printed in full in the late nineteenth century, and the resulting volumes are the best free source for the laws, jurisdictions, and officeholders that produced the state's genealogical records.

• The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina — twenty-six volumes edited by William L. Saunders and Walter Clark, with a four-volume index — print the council and assembly journals, official correspondence, court proceedings, muster rolls, petitions, and session laws of the colony and the early state. The full text is free and searchable at Documenting the American South, and the volumes are free on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The statutes themselves are gathered in volumes 23 through 25 of the State Records, which reprint the acts of the colonial and early state assemblies.
• The nineteenth-century compilations — the successive revisals of the laws, the Revised Statutes of 1837, the Revised Code of 1855, and the annual session laws — are digitized on the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books.
• Laws worth knowing because they created records: the act of 1741 requiring a bond before a marriage license could issue; the statutes governing land entry, warrant, survey, and grant; the apprenticeship and bastardy laws administered by the county courts; the cohabitation act of 1866; and the constitution of 1868, which abolished the old county court and created the offices of Register of Deeds and Clerk of Superior Court.
• The reported decisions of the North Carolina Supreme Court, which took its modern form in 1818, are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, and land and estate cases in them often recite family relationships in detail.
• The State Archives of North Carolina holds the records of the General Assembly, including bills, committee papers, and the petitions sent up from the counties.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Statewide civil registration of births and deaths began on October 1, 1913, and compliance was uneven for the first several years. A few municipalities kept earlier registers of their own — Raleigh recorded deaths from 1885 and births from 1890, and Wilmington deaths from 1903 and births from 1904 — but for most of the state there is no civil birth or death record before 1913, and church registers, family Bibles, cemeteries, obituaries, and the census must serve in their place. Marriages are a different story, and are documented from the colonial period onward.

Marriage bonds, 1741–1868. A colonial statute of 1741 required the prospective groom and a bondsman — very often the bride's father, brother, or another relative — to post a bond with the county before a marriage license could be issued. The bond records the intention to marry rather than the ceremony, so it is dated shortly before the wedding and does not prove that the marriage took place; the bondsman's name is frequently the most valuable clue on the page. The originals are held by the State Archives of North Carolina and have been indexed and digitized. From 1868 the county Register of Deeds issued and recorded marriage licenses in the modern form, and the license and return name the parties, their parents, and the officiant.

Access. Certified copies are limited to the person named and close family, but uncertified copies for genealogical use are broadly available, and a fee applies. Births from 1913 onward and the later deaths are ordered from North Carolina Vital Records or from the Register of Deeds of the county where the event occurred; deaths registered before 1930 and the older marriage records are at the State Archives. Death certificates through the mid-1970s are open to public inspection. Use the indexes below to fix the county and date, then order the certificate.

• Births (from 1913): North Carolina Birth Index, 1800–2000 — free on FamilySearch. Delayed birth certificates, filed later in life by people born before registration began, are held by the county Register of Deeds and are often the only birth document for a person born in the 1800s.
• Marriages (bonds from 1741, licenses from 1868): North Carolina County Marriages, 1762–1979 and North Carolina Marriages, 1759–1979 — free on FamilySearch, with images of the county registers and bonds; also North Carolina Marriage Records, 1741–2011 ($), which draws the bonds, licenses, registers, and the 1866 cohabitation records into a single searchable index.
• Early civil marriages: North Carolina Civil Marriages, 1763–1868 — free on FamilySearch.
• Deaths (from 1913): North Carolina Deaths, 1906–1930 and North Carolina Deaths, 1931–1994 — free on FamilySearch; the certificates themselves, which give parents' names and birthplaces, are imaged in North Carolina Death Certificates, 1909–1976 ($).

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped North Carolina's jurisdictions and records:

• 1584–1590 — English voyages to Roanoke Island; the colony left there in 1587 disappears.
• 1663 and 1665 — Charles II charters Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors.
• 1660s — Settlers move south from Virginia into the Albemarle, the first lasting European settlement in the colony.
• 1668 — Currituck, Chowan, Pasquotank, and Perquimans are organized as precincts, the ancestors of the state's oldest counties.
• 1710 — Swiss and Palatine German settlers under Christoph von Graffenried found New Bern.
• 1711–1715 — The Tuscarora War devastates the coastal plain and drives most of the Tuscarora north.
• 1712 — North Carolina and South Carolina are placed under separate governors.
• 1729 — The Crown buys out seven of the eight proprietary shares and North Carolina becomes a royal colony; Earl Granville keeps his one-eighth share.
• 1744–1763 — Land in the northern half of the colony, the Granville District, is granted by Earl Granville's agents rather than by the Crown.
• 1750s — The Moravians settle the Wachovia tract (Bethabara in 1753, Salem in 1766), and Scots-Irish and German families pour down the Great Wagon Road into the Piedmont.
• 1771 — The Battle of Alamance ends the Regulator rising against colonial officials.
• April 12, 1776 — The Halifax Resolves authorize North Carolina's delegates to vote for independence; a state constitution follows in December.
• 1789–1790 — North Carolina cedes its western lands to the United States; they become Tennessee.
• November 21, 1789 — The Fayetteville convention ratifies the U.S. Constitution and North Carolina becomes the twelfth state.
• 1792 — Raleigh is established as the permanent capital.
• 1799 — Gold is found on the Reed farm in what is now Cabarrus County, touching off the first American gold rush and drawing miners into the Piedmont.
• 1831 — The State House at Raleigh burns; the present Capitol is completed in 1840.
• 1849–1856 — The North Carolina Railroad is built, pulling trade and settlement toward the Piedmont towns along its line.
• May 20, 1861 — North Carolina secedes, and goes on to furnish more troops to the Confederacy, and to lose more of them, than any other state.
• 1865 — Fort Fisher falls in January, closing Wilmington, the last major Confederate port; the surrender at Bennett Place in April ends the war in the state.
• 1866 — The cohabitation act directs formerly enslaved couples to register their marriages with the county, creating one of the state's most valuable records.
• 1868 — A new constitution abolishes the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions and creates the offices of Register of Deeds and Clerk of Superior Court; marriage licenses replace bonds.
• 1898 — The Wilmington coup overthrows the city government and drives out much of its Black population.
• 1911 — Avery and Hoke, the last two counties, are created.
• 1913 — Statewide registration of births and deaths begins on October 1.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years from 1790 through 1950. North Carolina's 1790 schedules survive except for Caswell, Granville, and Orange counties; the 1800 returns are lost for Craven, Greene, New Hanover, and Wake, and the 1820 returns for Currituck, Franklin, Martin, Montgomery, Randolph, and Wake. The 1890 federal census was almost entirely destroyed, and only fragments for two townships in Gaston County and one in Cleveland County survive. The censuses are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site, and are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).

State and colonial enumerations. North Carolina never adopted the regular cycle of state censuses that some states did, and there is only one substantial state enumeration — which makes the tax lists described below all the more important.

• 1784–1787: the State Census of North Carolina, 1784–1787 ($), ordered by the General Assembly in 1784 and taken county by county over the following three years. It names the head of each household and tallies the rest by age, sex, and race, and it catches many families who left the state before the first federal census was taken. Returns survive for roughly two dozen counties, among them Bertie, Burke, Caswell, Chowan, Duplin, Gates, Granville, Halifax, Hyde, Johnston, Jones, Martin, Montgomery, New Hanover, Northampton, Onslow, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Pitt, Richmond, Surry, Tyrrell, Warren, and Wilkes. The same enumeration is free on FamilySearch.
• Colonial lists: lists of tithables, militia returns, and rolls of inhabitants compiled by colonial officials are scattered through the Colonial and State Records and among the colonial papers at the State Archives. They are the closest thing the colony has to a census, and for many families they are the earliest record of all.

Special schedules and substitutes. The slave schedules of 1850 and 1860 name the enslaver and list the enslaved by age, sex, and color; the mortality schedules of 1850 through 1880 record the deaths of the year preceding each census, decades before civil registration; and the special 1890 schedule of Union veterans and widows survives for the state. Because there is so little in the way of a state census, tax lists are the most important substitute of all, followed by city directories and militia rolls.

Church Records

With no civil birth or death records before 1913, church registers are the chief substitute for vital records across most of North Carolina's history — and in the case of the Quakers and the Moravians they are among the fullest records of their kind anywhere in the country.

• Quakers (the Society of Friends): monthly meeting minutes record births, deaths, marriages, removals from one meeting to another, and disownments, often naming whole families across several generations. Friends settled early in Perquimans and Pasquotank in the northeast, and later in Guilford, Randolph, and Alamance in the Piedmont; many later removed to the Midwest, and the certificates of removal follow them. The records are held by the Friends Historical Collection at Guilford College, are abstracted in the first volume of William Wade Hinshaw's Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, and are digitized in U.S. Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935 ($).
• Moravians: the Wachovia congregations kept remarkably complete church books, diaries, and personal memoirs. They are held by the Moravian Archives, Southern Province, and the multi-volume Records of the Moravians in North Carolina translates and prints much of the material; it is free on the Internet Archive.
• Anglican and Episcopal: the Church of England was the established church of the colony under the vestry acts, but parishes were large and thinly served and few colonial registers survive; vestry minutes and the diocesan archives are the places to look.
• Presbyterian: the church of the Scots-Irish Piedmont and of the Highland Scots of the Cape Fear valley. Session minutes and registers are held by individual congregations and by denominational archives.
• Baptist and Methodist: both grew quickly after the Revolution and became the largest denominations in the state. Baptist church minute books are unusually useful, following members through admission, dismission by letter, and discipline; the Methodist conference records are held at Duke University.
• Lutheran and German Reformed: the churches of the Piedmont German settlements, with baptismal and confirmation registers often kept in German.

Digitized congregational registers and minute books can be found through the FamilySearch Catalog by county and town, and through DigitalNC and the North Carolina Digital Collections. Roman Catholic records are comparatively late and are held by the parish or diocesan archives.

Court Records

The county court was the center of local government in North Carolina for two centuries, and its records reach far beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, apprenticeships, roads, and the ordinary business of neighbors. Knowing which court sat when tells you where to look.

• Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, in each county from the late 1600s until 1868 — the workhorse court, held by the justices of the peace four times a year. It proved wills, appointed administrators and guardians, bound out orphans and apprentices, took bastardy bonds, ordered roads laid out, registered stock marks, and received deeds for recording. Its minute books are the best running record of a county's inhabitants.
• Superior Court, authorized in 1777 and sitting in every county from 1806 — the trial court for the more serious civil and criminal cases, and a court of record for naturalizations and divorces.
• After 1868 the constitution abolished the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions and transferred its business to the Superior Court and to the newly created Clerk of Superior Court, who has kept the county's probate records ever since.
• Colonial higher courts — the General Court and the district courts that followed it — heard the graver cases; their surviving papers are at the State Archives and many are printed in the Colonial and State Records.
• Supreme Court, from 1818 — the appellate court, whose printed reports often set out family relationships in unusual detail.

The State Archives of North Carolina holds the surviving colonial and county court records, and its county-by-county finding aids are the fastest way to learn what survives; scattered courthouse fires destroyed records in some counties, so check the finding aid before concluding that a record never existed. Information on the modern courts is available from the North Carolina Judicial Branch.

Ethnic/Minority Records

North Carolina was settled by very different peoples arriving from very different directions, and knowing where a group settled points to the records most likely to document a family.

• Cherokee. The Cherokee held the mountains of the far west. Most were removed to the Indian Territory in 1838, but several hundred remained and became the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, centered on the Qualla Boundary. Cherokee descent is traced through a well-known series of federal rolls — the Henderson Roll of 1835, the Mullay Roll of 1848, the Siler Roll of 1851, the Chapman Roll of 1852, the Hester Roll of 1883, the Guion Miller Roll of 1909, and the Baker Roll of 1924, which is the base roll for Eastern Band enrollment. The Museum of the Cherokee People interprets the history.
• Other Indian nations. The Lumbee of Robeson and the neighboring counties are the largest Indian community in the state; the Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, Meherrin, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Sappony, and Waccamaw Siouan are also recognized by the state. The Tuscarora dominated the coastal plain until the war of 1711–1715, after which most moved north to join the Iroquois. For these communities the research usually runs through ordinary county records — deeds, tax lists, marriage bonds, apprenticeship bonds, and census returns, where families were often recorded as free people of color — supplemented by Indian agency records at the National Archives.
• African Americans. Before the Civil War the state held both a large enslaved population and one of the largest free Black populations in the South, and the record trail runs through both. The cohabitation registers of 1866 are the essential starting point: after emancipation, formerly enslaved couples were directed to register their marriages with the county, and the registers commonly give both partners' names, the length of the union, and the last enslaver — a rare bridge across 1865. They are free in the North Carolina Digital Collections and are indexed in the Ancestry marriage collection above. North Carolina Freedmen's Bureau Field Office Records are free on FamilySearch, and the Bureau's labor contracts, ration rolls, complaints, and marriage records name thousands of people. Going back before emancipation, the county estate files and deeds name enslaved people as property, apprenticeship and bastardy bonds document free families of color, and the slave schedules of 1850 and 1860 record households. The Digital Library on American Slavery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with its runaway slave advertisements, is free and searchable by name.
• Highland Scots. Gaelic-speaking Highlanders settled the upper Cape Fear valley around present-day Fayetteville from the 1730s, and in far greater numbers after Culloden. Presbyterian congregational records, county deeds, and the Loyalist claims filed after the Revolution document them.
• Scots-Irish and Germans. From the 1740s families moved down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania and Virginia into the Piedmont, and this migration — not the seaports — peopled much of the state. The Scots-Irish left Presbyterian records; the Germans left Lutheran and German Reformed registers, and both usually left a paper trail in Pennsylvania or Virginia as well.
• Swiss and Palatine Germans. New Bern was founded in 1710 by Swiss and Palatine settlers under Christoph von Graffenried; the Tuscarora War scattered many of them within a few years.
• Huguenots. French Protestant families settled along the Pamlico and Trent rivers in the early 1700s, many arriving by way of Virginia.

Immigration and Naturalization

North Carolina's coast is guarded by shoals and barrier islands and never had a great immigrant port. Most of the people who settled the state arrived overland — south from Virginia into the Albemarle, and down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into the Piedmont — and those who came by sea generally landed at Charleston or Philadelphia and traveled in from there. The practical consequence is that arrival records are thin, and the county records of the place a family settled will usually tell you more than any port record.

• Colonial arrivals are documented indirectly: in headright claims, by which a settler claimed acreage for each person whose passage he paid; in oaths of allegiance and denizations; and in the port and shipping papers printed in the Colonial and State Records.
• Federal passenger lists for the state's ports begin late: North Carolina, Wilmington and Morehead City Passenger and Crew Lists, 1908–1958 is free on FamilySearch, and the same records are indexed on Findmypast ($).
• Customs and merchant-shipping records for Wilmington, New Bern, Edenton, Beaufort, and the Ocracoke inlet ports survive among the federal records and at the State Archives, and can place a mariner or a vessel where no passenger list exists.

Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record could naturalize, so North Carolina naturalizations turn up in colonial court papers, in the minutes of the county Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, in Superior Court records, and in the federal courts; most of the surviving colonial, state, and county records are at the State Archives of North Carolina. After 1906 the process was federalized, and the declarations and petitions were filed in the federal district courts — the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of North Carolina — whose records are held by the National Archives at Atlanta.

Land Records

As a state-land state, North Carolina granted its own land rather than passing it through the federal government, so there are no General Land Office records. Original title came from four successive authorities, and knowing which one granted an ancestor's land tells you which body of records to search.

• The Lords Proprietors (1663–1729). The eight proprietors named in the Carolina charters granted land through their governors and land offices, chiefly in the Albemarle and along the coastal rivers, and largely on the headright system, which gave a settler a right to acreage for each person he transported into the colony.
• The Crown (1729–1775). After the Crown bought out seven of the eight proprietary shares, the royal governors granted land in the southern half of the colony.
• The Granville District (1744–1763). Earl Granville, the one proprietor who did not sell, retained his one-eighth share as a broad band across the northern half of the colony — roughly the counties along the Virginia line and inland from them — and granted land there through his own agents rather than through the Crown. His grants form an entirely separate series, with their own entries, warrants, surveys, and signed deeds, and they matter enormously, because the district covered much of the country settled by the Scots-Irish, the Germans, the Quakers, and the Moravians. Granville's land office closed at his death and no grants issued in the district between 1763 and the Revolution, which is why many settlers of that period appear in the record only as squatters or as purchasers by deed.
• The State of North Carolina (from 1777). After independence the state granted its vacant land through a land office in each county. The process ran in four steps — the entry, filed with the county entry taker; the warrant to survey; the survey, with its plat and chain carriers; and the grant itself, issued by the state — and each step can produce a document naming neighbors, relatives, and witnesses.

The Tennessee grants. The western lands that North Carolina ceded in 1789–1790 became Tennessee, but the state had already granted land there and continued to honor claims afterward — including the military bounty land given to Revolutionary soldiers in the Military Reservation of middle Tennessee. Those grants are North Carolina records, kept with the state's own, and anyone tracing a family into early Tennessee should search them.

Where the records are kept.

• County level: deeds, mortgages, and plats are recorded by the Register of Deeds. Recording was not universal in the earliest years, so a title may be documented only by the grant, or by a reference in a later conveyance.
• State Archives of North Carolina: the State Archives holds the land grant files — entries, warrants, surveys, and the grants themselves — along with the Granville proprietary records and the original deed books of most counties.
• Online: North Carolina Land Grant Images and Data is free and indispensable, indexing the state's grants from the proprietary period into the twentieth century and linking to images of the grant books, the Granville grants, the loose survey and warrant papers, and the grants for land now in Tennessee. North Carolina Land Grant Files, 1693–1960 ($) covers the same series, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed deeds and grants searchable by every name they contain, including grantors, grantees, witnesses, and adjoining landowners.

Military Records

North Carolina took part in every American conflict, and the state kept its own service and pension records alongside the federal ones, so the State Archives is the first stop for anything state-generated.

• Colonial wars and militia: muster rolls and militia returns from the Tuscarora War, the French and Indian War, and the Regulator troubles are scattered through the Colonial and State Records and among the colonial papers at the State Archives.
• Revolutionary War: the Continental Line and the militia are documented in federal service and pension files, and, at the state level, in the Revolutionary War Army Accounts and pay vouchers held by the State Archives — frequently the only surviving proof that a militiaman served. Bounty land for Revolutionary service was granted in the western lands that became Tennessee.
• War of 1812: muster and payrolls of the North Carolina militia are held at the State Archives and among the federal records.
• Civil War: the standard reference is the multi-volume roster North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865, which reconstructs each regiment company by company from the surviving rolls. Confederate service records are free on FamilySearch as North Carolina Civil War Service Records of Confederate Soldiers, and are also on Fold3 ($) and Ancestry ($). The state began granting Confederate pensions in 1885, and the applications — which name the widow, the unit, and often the wounds — are at the State Archives, with the 1901 applications free in the North Carolina Digital Collections and indexed free on FamilySearch. North Carolina also furnished Union soldiers, including United States Colored Troops regiments raised in the eastern counties.
• Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II: the State Archives holds the state's muster rolls and service-record cards, and the federal draft registration cards of the First World War, which give each man's birth date and nearest relative, are indexed on FamilySearch and Ancestry.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, and guardianships of minors — is the richest single source for family relationships in North Carolina, and the state is unusual in how much of it sits in one place: the loose estate files of nearly every county, arranged by county and surname, are at the State Archives. The two dividing lines to remember are 1760 and 1868.

• Before 1760: wills were proved centrally and filed with the Secretary of the colony. These early wills, running from the 1660s, are at the State Archives and are digitized free as the Secretary of State Wills; the standard printed finding aids are J. Bryan Grimes's Abstract of North Carolina Wills and North Carolina Wills and Inventories, both free on the Internet Archive.
• 1760–1868: the county Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions proved wills, granted administrations, appointed guardians, and received the inventories, accounts of sale, and divisions of estate that follow a death. The estate file — petitions, bonds, inventories, and receipts signed by the heirs — is usually far more informative than the will, and often exists where no will was ever written.
• Since 1868: the Clerk of Superior Court in each county has handled probate, and the estate file continues in much the same form.

Online, North Carolina Estate Files, 1663–1979 and North Carolina Probate Records, 1735–1970 are free on FamilySearch and browsable by county; North Carolina Wills and Probate Records, 1665–1998 ($) is name-searchable across the state; and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed wills and estate papers searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Tax lists count for more in North Carolina than in most states, because there is so little census to fall back on. A colonial or early state list names the taxable inhabitants of a county household by household, year after year, and a run of consecutive lists will show when a young man came of age, when a father died and his widow took over the household, and when a family sold out and moved on.

• Colonial and early state lists: the colonial lists count tithables — the taxable persons in a household, generally white males over sixteen, enslaved people over twelve, and free people of color — rather than acres, which makes them a rough census as well as a tax record. Later lists tax the poll and the land together. The county lists are held by the State Archives of North Carolina, arranged by county and year; many are digitized on FamilySearch and on DigitalNC, and many more have been abstracted and published.
• Federal assessment lists: U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) covers the Civil War income, license, and luxury taxes, which reach many men who appear in no other federal record of those years; the 1862–1874 lists are also free on FamilySearch.
• Later records: county tax offices hold the modern assessment and levy books, and the older volumes are often found among the county's records at the State Archives or on microfilm.