Written in Stone

Joseph Cox

Finding Your North Carolina Ancestors

For anyone tracing family roots through North Carolina, a gravestone is often the most honest document an ancestor ever left behind. Long before the state required standardized birth and death registration, a carved headstone might be the only surviving record of a birth date, a maiden name, a spouse’s identity, or a place of origin. A single stone can break through a genealogical brick wall that decades of paper records never touch.

Because North Carolina’s cemetery evidence is scattered across physical stones, decades-old survey cards, digitized collections, and archival folders that have never been indexed online, good research means working several channels at once. This guide covers all of them — cemetery-specific sources first, then the wider records ecosystem that supports and confirms what a headstone tells you. Every source below has been checked against current, primary information.

1. Modern Online Cemetery Databases

These are usually the fastest starting point, since they let you search by name across the whole state in seconds rather than browsing county by county.

  • North Carolina Cemetery Census — a volunteer-run project organized by county, often including GPS-style directions to rural or hard-to-find burial grounds and transcriptions contributed by people with genuine local knowledge.
  • Find A Grave — crowdsourced memorial pages with headstone photos, biographies, and linked family members. Its Photo Request feature lets a local volunteer photograph a specific grave for researchers who live far from North Carolina.
  • BillionGraves — distinguished by GPS-tagged photos taken through its mobile app, useful for pinpointing a grave’s exact location within a large cemetery.
  • NCGenWeb, part of the national USGenWeb Project — a volunteer coordinator network with cemetery listings, transcriptions, and partial name indexes for each county. Its companion archive of contributed transcriptions lives at usgwarchives.us/nc, which is the address to bookmark for county-by-county cemetery, Bible, and court-record transcriptions.

Tip: search variant spellings — 19th-century stonecutters weren’t always literate — and check linked family members’ memorials on Find A Grave even when researching only one person; a spouse’s page sometimes has better photos or more complete information.

2. The WPA Pre-1914 Cemetery Index

One of the richest sources for pre-1914 North Carolina ancestors dates to the Great Depression. Starting in 1935, workers with the Works Progress Administration’s Historical Records Survey walked cemeteries across the majority of North Carolina’s counties and copied down every legible inscription dated before 1914 — roughly 100,000 gravestones in total, an index card for each one recording the inscription, county, cemetery name, and sometimes handwritten directions to otherwise-unmapped burial grounds.

The full card index held at the State Archives is actually larger than the pre-1914 figure suggests: it is organized into roughly 8,000 Cemetery Summary Cards and more than 268,000 Tombstone Inscription Cards covering both pre- and post-1914 burials, so there is considerably more material here than the headline number implies.

Where to find it

  • In person: the original cards are filed alphabetically by surname in the Search Room at the State Archives of North Carolina in Raleigh.
  • Online (fastest route): the original survey volumes have now been scanned and published directly by the state, county by county, in the North Carolina Digital Collections — search “[county name] Cemetery Survey Records.” Many counties are now fully browsable online, which often eliminates the need for a Search Room visit entirely.
  • Also online: FamilySearch — use the Search Catalog (not the general search bar), enter “North Carolina” as the place, then look under “North Carolina – Cemeteries – Indexes.” Several NCGenWeb county pages have also built their own surname indexes to specific counties’ WPA files.

Since the late 1970s, the State Archives has also collected cemetery surveys donated by genealogical and historical organizations and volunteers, which occasionally supplement or correct the WPA data and document more recent burial sites. Treat any single WPA transcription as a lead rather than a verified fact — typos, misread dates, and skipped stones are common — and confirm against a photo or the stone itself wherever possible.

3. Archival Surveys, DAR Collections & Published Books

Older, independent surveys are often more reliable than what remains legible on a stone today, since soft 18th- and 19th-century markers weather badly.

  • State Archives collections: unpublished survey worksheets and county-arranged transcriptions compiled by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), many focused on locating the graves of Revolutionary War soldiers and their families.
  • Published county cemetery books: often include maps, plot layouts, and family notes beyond a bare transcription. Held at the North Carolina State Library, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City (via FamilySearch’s affiliate network), and university special collections including UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections Library, Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, East Carolina University’s Joyner Library (strong for eastern NC), and Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library.

4. Vital Records

Ordering rules directly from the state office:

  • Births: available from NC Vital Records for events from October 1, 1913 to present. For births before that date, go to the county Register of Deeds where the birth occurred — the state holds nothing earlier.
  • Deaths: the state office holds records from 1930 to present. For deaths before 1930, contact the State Archives directly rather than Vital Records; a small number of delayed death records exist back to 1909.
  • Marriages: the state office holds copies only from 1962 forward; earlier licenses are at the county Register of Deeds where the license was issued.
  • Divorces: the state office holds records from 1958 forward; earlier filings are with the county Clerk of Court.

5. Digitized Newspapers, Manuscripts & Local Collections

  • DigitalNC / North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, housed at UNC’s Wilson Library — a free, growing repository now standing at over 250 contributing institutions and 170,000+ digitized items, including yearbooks, city directories, historic newspapers, and family Bible records.
  • North Carolina Digital Collections — hosts the digitized WPA cemetery surveys directly, along with 50+ other curated collections from the State Archives and State Library.
  • Documenting the American South (UNC) — digitized first-person Southern narratives and church histories for social and family context.
  • Chronicling America — free, searchable historic newspapers, including many North Carolina titles, useful for obituaries.

6. Denominational Archives

  • Moravian Archives, Southern Province, Winston-Salem — maintains its own dedicated Graveyard Database as part of its Family History resources, a direct hit for anyone researching ancestors from the Moravian communities of Salem, Bethabara, or Bethania. Research visits can be scheduled directly through the Archives.
  • Guilford College Friends Historical Collection (Quaker records), Greensboro — holds over 6,000 manuscript volumes of monthly meeting minutes and records dating from 1680 to the present, one of the most substantial denominational archives in the state.
  • Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library — a deep collection of Baptist church, association, and biographical records for North Carolina Baptists.

7. Broader Society & Index Sites

  • Cyndi’s List – North Carolina — a long-standing, well-organized directory of thousands of North Carolina-specific genealogy links.
  • NC Genealogical Society — the statewide genealogical society; publishes a quarterly journal with denomination-specific research guides (Moravian, Quaker, Presbyterian, Baptist, and more) and hosts an annual conference in Raleigh, close to the State Archives and State Library.
  • NCpedia — not an archive itself, but an essential reference for county formation history, since North Carolina’s county boundaries shifted repeatedly between the 1660s and 1911.

8. Physical, County-Level Resources

  • County Register of Deeds offices — the primary local source for original deeds, marriage licenses, and often older birth and death records predating full state registration.
  • County “North Carolina Room” or local history rooms in public libraries — Charlotte Mecklenburg, Forsyth County, Cumberland County, and Asheville-Buncombe libraries all hold substantial material never digitized.
  • County historical and genealogical societies — many maintain member-only indexes and surname files not available anywhere online.
  • Local FamilySearch Family History Centers — free access to microfilm and subscription databases that would otherwise require a personal subscription.

9. If You Can’t Visit in Person

Not every researcher lives near North Carolina, and a physical visit isn’t always practical. These options can substitute for boots on the ground:

  • Use Photo Request features on Find A Grave and BillionGraves — a local volunteer photographs the specific grave for you, often within days to weeks.
  • Ask a county coordinator or local society for a lookup — many NCGenWeb county coordinators and local genealogical societies will do a records or cemetery lookup by mail or email, sometimes for a small fee or a self-addressed stamped envelope.
  • Request records by mail or email from the State Archives or a county Register of Deeds — most will search for and copy a specific document (a WPA card, a deed, a certificate) without requiring a visit.
  • Check satellite and street-level imagery (Google Earth or Google Street View) to confirm a rural or abandoned cemetery still exists, gauge its size, and spot access roads before asking a volunteer to go find it.
  • Try county genealogy Facebook groups and “Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness” (RAOGK-style) communities — active, informal networks of local volunteers who will often walk a cemetery, check a courthouse index, or snap a photo as a favor.
  • Contact the town clerk, church office, or cemetery association directly for smaller or private cemeteries — many keep their own burial ledgers or plot maps that were never submitted to any statewide survey.
  • Hire a local professional researcher for a deep dive into unindexed archival material, such as unpublished DAR surveys or county deed books — a paid researcher based in Raleigh or the relevant county can often do in a day what would otherwise take a multi-day trip.

Fieldwork Tips & Best Practices

  • Keep a research log of every county, cemetery, and surname searched, with dates and outcomes, to avoid duplicating effort.
  • Check church and sexton records when a grave is unmarked or unrecorded — “sexton” is a standard genealogical term (not specific to North Carolina) for whoever historically managed a church or cemetery and kept its burial log. Many rural North Carolina churches kept these ledgers, and they were often never transcribed anywhere public.
  • Explore the surrounding graves — family plots and neighborly burial customs mean nearby stones are frequently in-laws or migrating neighbors who can reveal a maiden name or a previous home county.
  • Call ahead for rural or private cemeteries — some are on active farmland or behind locked gates, and a courtesy call to the landowner or church office can save a wasted trip.
  • Bring the right tools — a soft brush and water (never bleach, chalk, or shaving cream, which damage stone) to gently clean a hard-to-read inscription, plus a phone flashlight held at a low angle to throw shadow across worn lettering and make it legible again.
  • Photograph, don’t just transcribe — take a wide shot for context and a close shot of the inscription, so you (or someone else later) can double-check a transcription against the original.
  • Give back — photograph stones beyond just your own ancestor’s and upload them to Find A Grave or BillionGraves to help the next researcher facing the same brick wall.

Suggested order of operations: start broad with online databases, use the WPA index and archival surveys to fill in what’s missing (especially pre-1914 burials), and treat an in-person visit — or one of the remote alternatives above — as the last step to confirm details and survey the surrounding plot.All external links open in a new tab. Sources checked against current state and institutional records.