I have just spent the last couple of hours in Land Record Heaven. Surry County and Yadkin County, both in North Carolina have Grantor/Grantee indexes online. Once I had a book and page number, I emailed the clerk in the office of the Register of Deeds for each county and ordered copies of the deeds. The cost? 25 cents per page plus postage. Hip hip hooray for me and if you have ancestors in either of these counties, then hip hip hooray for you too!
The Surry County Register of Deeds has digital images of the deed books - both the Grantor and the Grantee books and you can access them here. It covers the years 1771 to the present.
The Yadkin County, North Carolina Register of Deeds Remote Access Website has the Grantor and the Grantee books covering 1850 to present.
These sites have been a goldmine for me. I am now able to make a solid connection between 20 families that I have been researching. Some of the surnames are: HARRIS, NAYLOR, WELBORN/WILBORN, VESTAL, MESSICK, BROWN, WALLACE, HAWKINS, DAVIS and FOOTE. These families all lived in Surry, Yadkin and Wilkes counties, North Carolina from at least 1800 and from 1869 to 1875 migrated to Poweshiek and Greene counties, Iowa in groups.
Bits and pieces of information have identified most all of these families as Methodist Episcopalians who lived in the same communities in North Carolina and stayed together when they arrived in Iowa. I have marriage records and census records. I have cemetery records and probate records. But now I have the records that I feel truly and most certainly prove kinship - Land Records!
Wow! I sure wish that was available for my main area of research. I did/am doing it all by hand. Wow again.
ReplyDeleteCongrats! I love finding records online and being able to order them at a reasonable cost. Haven't found that yet in New York.
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