The Honorable Sherri B. Richard has helped make it possible for Craven County researchers to view all land records online.
Thanks in large part to the Honorable Sherri B. Richard, the Craven County Register of Deeds now has all land records available online dating back to 1737.
That means you will no longer need to go sit for hours at a time poring through old deed indices and heavy deed books to search your Craven County ancestors’ land records!
It’s a complicated process so I’m including step-by-step instructions below.
Screenshots are included for the actual search database.
You can start at the Register of Deeds home page.
OR IF YOU PREFER, you can bypass that initial page and go right to the Disclaimer page.
You’ll need to click on the link at the bottom of the Disclaimer page that says you Accept the Disclaimer. It will let you continue to the deeds search site.
As soon as you come to the page, you’ll need to click on the link that says “Sign in as a Guest.”
That will take you to a page that looks like this. Click on Land Records 1737-1983 in the top menu as shown below.
It will take you to a page with a dropdown box.
From the dropdown box, select INDEX TO REAL ESTATE 1737-1983.
Next, decide if you want to do a GRANTOR or GRANTEE search, then type in the last name you are searching.
Click on Search.
It will bring up results like this:
If I click on Select next to the first line, MORRIS, it will bring me to a page like this:
Let’s say I want to look at that second item between James MORRIS and AENEAS MCINTOSH. I can see it is found in Book 2, p. 389.
Now, I need to SELECT that book from the box in the top right-hand corner, and then type the page number in the corresponding box, then click on SEARCH. (PLEASE NOTE: You need to make sure you put your cursor all the way to the left in the PAGE # box, because otherwise you won’t be able to type anything.)
Bingo! Here’s the document I was searching for!
Since it’s kind of small to read like this, you can click on a button to make it full screen.
Here is a screenshot of another document at full screen:
And here’s ONE MORE TIP: If you’d like to SAVE the page(s) of your ancestor’s deed, just click on the PRINT button in the top left-hand corner, but when you get to your print options, choose SAVE AS PDF. It gives you options to PRINT one page, or several selected pages.
I will be the first to admit I’ll probably never leave the house again because I’ll be searching this database endlessly for my own ancestors.
Have fun and please comment below if you have any questions or success stories about ancestors you’ve found through this great new feature of the Register of Deeds site.
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