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The not-exactly-lost have been found

The Legal Genealogist‘s brain is exploding here at mid-week. Is that a capital L in German script or a capital B? A lower-case E or lower-case N? Is that goofy-looking pen mark the “flag” of a capital K or is that a capital R?

Sigh… any genealogist who’s tried to learn German Gothic handwriting knows the pain…

That doesn’t mean the class I’m taking in German Gothic and Fraktur at the virtual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy this week isn’t about the most fun I’ve ever had at an institute. Warren Bittner and his team are making this a terrific learning experience.

But oy… between classes and homework, time is in such short supply.

So another snippet today — for North Carolina researchers, this time.

Snippet 2 for 2022

And it’s some very good news indeed: the folks at the North Carolina Historical Records Online (NCHRO) have announced that 1,434 very early North Carolina land grants never before included in any online databases have been added to NCHRO’s free website http://nclandgrants.com.

According to the NCHRO announcement, “these grants represent almost 40% of all grants issued under the Lords Proprietors of North Carolina from 1663 to 1730, representing just under 1,000 individual land owners and a total of over 600,000 acres of land.”

They’re called the “missing” land records by some, but in truth they’ve always been available — they’re at the North Carolina State Archives and are included in the published books of land grant abstracts by Margaret Hoffman. But they’ve never been searchable while sitting at home in our jammies at 3 a.m. before. So more accurately we’ll call them the not-quite-missing records that can now be found online.

Read more about these newly-searchable records online at the nclandgrants.com website — and have fun trying to locate your earliest North Carolina landowners and viewing their actual entries in the land patent books.

And we can all sit here impatiently waiting for more images of other North Carolina land records and other historical records to be added to the website… a process we can help by contributing


Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Snippet: Finding NC land,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 12 Jan 2022).