About the court minutes

The Orange County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions met four times a year from 1752 until 1868. Its justices proved deeds and wills, granted estates, bound out orphans and other children, licensed taverns, ferries and mills, ordered roads, named constables and jurors, heard suits and minor criminal cases, and ran the county’s business. The minute books are in the State Archives of North Carolina.

Where these records come from

Each entry here is Orange County Indexed’s own record of one item of business: its kind, the people and their roles, places, amounts, dates, and a short summary in our words. The records are made from published work, which we credit on every entry and do not reproduce:

• 1787 to 1818: Mark Chilton’s transcription of the minutes, published on his blog Orange County Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions while he was Orange County Register of Deeds. Each entry links to his transcription of its court term. Where he noted the deed-book page of a deed proved in court, the entry links to our record of that deed.
• 1752 to 1766 (being added): Ruth Herndon Shields, Abstracts of the Minutes of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions of Orange County.
• 1777 to 1788 (being added): Alma Cheek Redden, Abstracts of the Minutes of the Inferior Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions of Orange County, N.C., 1777–1788. The Orange County Public Library has a copy signed by her (NC 929.375 HAU).

The Wall Local History Collection at the Orange County Public Library in Hillsborough holds the State Archives’ microfilm of the minute books, 1752–1868, on ten reels numbered 30001 to 30010, two minute books to a reel. Each entry gives its reel: 30001 for 1752–1766, 30002 for 1777–1795, 30003 for 1795–1804, 30004 for 1805–1814 and 30005 for 1815–1826.

The library also holds Weynette Parks Haun’s abstracts of the county court minutes (five volumes, 1752–1797) and of the Hillsborough District Superior Court minutes (1768–1802), which cover some of the years missing here.

Limits

• These records are made from transcriptions and abstracts, not from the minute books themselves. Where a reading in the source was uncertain, the entry carries a reading note.
• Abstracts leave things out. Shields notes many deeds only as “six deeds proved”, without names.
• Names are as the source writes them. Two entries naming a John Thompson may name two different men, and one man may be spelled several ways.
• An order is not an outcome: an order to sell, a license or a petition does not show that the sale took place, the tavern opened or the petition succeeded.
• Redden’s abstracts print one session of the Hillsborough District Superior Court, April 1786, among the county minutes; it is kept the same way. For February 1787 to February 1788, which both Redden and Chilton cover, the entries are Chilton’s: his transcription is the fuller of the two and holds nearly all of Redden’s.
• Shields’s abstracts also print the county road commissioners’ own meetings, 1753 to 1757. Their business is kept under the month of each meeting and marked as the commissioners’; a month with no county court recorded is listed as theirs, not as a court term.
• Enslaved people are recorded by the names the record gives, in the role the record gives them. People the record calls free are never recorded as enslaved.
• No source we have covers 1767 to 1776, and the State Archives’ microfilm of the minutes has no reel for those years.