Contact the Center
Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History
UNCW Library, Discovery Hall, 2nd floor
5162 Randall Dr.
Wilmington, NC 28403
csencah@uncw.edu
910-962-7810
Visit the Center
Location
The Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History is located on the 2nd floor of Discovery Hall in the UNCW Library.
Hours
The Center is open from 10am to 2pm, Monday - Friday. Appointments are not required, but we strongly encourage visitors to contact us in advance of any planned research visit to discuss your research topic and confirm the availability of collections. Onsite research assistance may be limited.
Access Policies
Prior to visiting the Center, users should familiarize themselves with our access and use policies.
Deed Research
The best way to research the ownership history of a property is using historical deeds, which can be accessed via the county Register of Deeds office. All Registers of Deeds provide access to an online database where deeds can be searched and accessed remotely, but many of these databases only include records from the past several decades. Establishing a chain of ownership for an historic property usually requires a visit to the Register of Deeds office to consult the deed books in person.
Below are links to the Register of Deeds websites for the counties in our region:
Tips for Searching Online Deed Databases
When searching an online deed database, you will need to know the name of at least one person or corporation who has owned the property. If you don't have this information, you can look up the property tax record for the current owner of the property, which is public information and usually available online. Most counties have a property tax database that will allow you to search for an address or click on a parcel on a map to see the current property owner's name. You can usually find this information by Googling the name of the county and "property tax search" (for example, "Pender County property tax search").
Once you know the property owner's name, you can search for the name in the Register of Deeds database to locate the original deed for the sale of the property. Generally, names will appear in deeds as one of two parties: the grantor (the person selling or transferring the property) and the grantee (the person buying or receiving the property). To establish a chain of ownership, you will usually need to search the database multiple times as you uncover the names of the preceding parties to earlier deeds for a single property.
Some Register of Deeds databases will allow you to search by parcel number to see a full list of all the names associated with that property, but this is not always the case. You can usually find the property's parcel ID on the property tax record or the deed record using either process described above.
Most deeds will describe prior transfers of a certain property by referencing the deed book number and page number of the book in which the earlier deed was recorded. Many Registers of Deeds have backscanned their old deed books and provide a way to look up historical deeds by book and page number, even if those deeds haven't been entered into their database. But often this research will require a visit to the Register of Deeds Office to look at the physical deed books themselves.
City and Business Directories
City directories include an alphabetical list of residents and their addresses, advertisements for local businesses, and an index of local services available for a particular city. While they are primarily business-focused, they include both residential and business addresses. Early directories may also include additional information about the residents listed, including their occupation and whether they owned or rented their home, and pre-integration directories tend to identify and delineate between white and Black residents and businesses.
City directories from across the state of North Carolina are accessible online via the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.
Many of Wilmington's turn-of-the-century city directories have been indexed by the New Hanover County Public Library and placed into a spreadsheet to allow users to more easily manipulate their data. This index can be found at the bottom of the library's guide to researching historic homes.
Closely related to city directories are business directories. The state of North Carolina has published several annual business directories, which can be accessed online:
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
From 1867 to 1977, the Sanborn Map Company of Pelham, New York, produced large-scale (usually 50 feet to the inch) color maps of commercial and industrial districts of some 12,000 towns and cities in North America to assist fire insurance companies in setting rates and terms. Each set of maps represented each built structure in those districts, its use, dimensions, height, building material, and other relevant features (fire alarms, water mains and hydrants, for example).
Sanborn maps were produced for a number of cities and municipalities in southeast North Carolina and were generally revised and updated over the course of multiple years and/or decades. These maps can be extremely useful in establishing the history of an individual property, city block, street, or neighborhood. Some entries on the maps include valuable information unrelated to the physical construction of the building, such as a property owner's name or a race descriptor (for racially segregated properties).
Sanborn maps for the state of North Carolina exist in numerous library databases that vary in coverage in terms of date, location, and access requirements. Several of these databases are linked below.
- Digital Sanborn Maps (1867-1970) for North CarolinaDigital Sanborn Maps (1867-1970) for North Carolina delivers detailed property and land-use records that depict the grid of everyday life in 158 North Carolina towns and cities across a century of change.
This database is sponsored by NC LIVE and requires a UNCW login or a library card from any North Carolina public library in order to use it.
- Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist (Library of Congress)Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist contains links to existing digital images from the LOC collection and will be updated as new images are added. Maps from dozens of North Carolina cities are included in the database.
- North Carolina Sanborn Maps (NC Maps Project)The North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill holds the most comprehensive collection of Sanborn® maps in North Carolina. The holdings range in date from the 1880s to the 1950s and cover more than 150 cities and towns across the state. North Carolina Maps features online all of the North Carolina Collection's Sanborn® maps produced through 1922. Maps published after that date will remain available for use on microfilm in the North Carolina Collection reading room.
Other Resources
Property-focused collections at the Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History:
- MS 029 Wilmington, North Carolina Historic Buildings SurveyThe Junior League of Wilmington began a survey of Wilmington’s historic buildings in 1974. The league extracted data from courthouse records and the Sanford Insurance maps and wrote on-site descriptions. This research was the basis of Old Wilmington Guidebook, which the Junior League published in 1978.
- LCF MS 001 William B. McKoy CollectionThis collection contains materials pertaining to Wilmington real estate transactions and landownership, organized by block within the original city limits, as well as Eagle Island, Wrightsville Beach, and Masonboro. Material originally belonged to William B. McKoy (1852-1928), a prominent attorney and historian in Wilmington from the 1880s to the 1920s. Materials include envelopes, plat drawings, single sheets of notes, maps, correspondence, mortgage certificates, deeds, Mechanics' Home Association documents, newspaper clippings, indentures, court documents, estate documents, tax documents, and ledgers. Materials date from 1801 to 1928, with the bulk of materials dating from 1845 to 1921, although most documents are undated and may reference real estate transactions from as early as the mid-eighteenth century.
Historic Homes: Your Story (New Hanover County Public Library): This guide explains how to research historic properties using New Hanover County Public Library resources as well as information available on the Internet.