About the wills

What is here

2,189 wills and other papers of Orange County, North Carolina, 1752 to 1892: every item in Will Books A to F (to 1850), a few original wills that were never recorded in the books, five wills of the 1750s known only from J. Bryan Grimes’s abstracts, and the wills in Will Books G and H, 1850 to 1893, as Mark Chilton’s index lists them. Most are wills and codicils. The will books also hold bills of sale, deeds of gift, powers of attorney, bonds, receipts and other papers the court proved, and these are here too.

Where the records come from

Each record is Orange County Indexed’s own record of one paper: its kind, who made it and when, the family and others it names and how they are related, executors and witnesses, land, goods and places, and a short summary in our words. The records are made from Ruth Herndon Shields’s two volumes of abstracts, Abstracts of Wills Recorded 1752 through 1800 in Orange County, North Carolina (Will Books A, B and C; revised edition 1966) and Abstracts of Wills Recorded in Orange County, North Carolina, 1800–1850 (1958), compiled for the Davie Poplar Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Chapel Hill. Every record cites the will book and page Shields gives and the page of her volume. Her own wording is not reproduced.

Mark Chilton’s index of the will books, “Wills Recorded in Orange County, NC 1756–1893” (2019), is a second, independent reading of the same books. Where his dates or the testator’s name differ from Shields’s, the record shows his reading beside hers. His references to the county court minutes give many of the links to the minutes. For Will Books G and H, after 1850, where Shields stops, his index is the only source here: each record gives the testator as the book names him, the dates, his references to the court minutes and his short notes on contests and dissents, but not the will’s contents.

The will books are on State Archives microfilm in the Wall Local History Collection at the Orange County Public Library: Will Books A and B on reel 80001, C and D on reel 80002, E and F on reel 80003, G and H on reel 80004. Each record names its reel.

Keep in mind

• An abstract is a summary. Shields gives the people, the land and the main bequests, not the full wording, and sometimes only “devises a number of slaves” or “several parcels of land”. Check the will book before relying on a detail.
• Names are spelled as the abstract spells them, even when the same person is spelled two ways in one will. Two records naming a John Thompson may name two different men.
• Enslaved people are recorded by the names the paper gives them, with who held them, who received them, and whether the paper directed that they be freed (a will could direct it, but freedom then needed the court’s approval). Where a paper counts people without naming them, the record says so. The papers’ racial labels are not repeated in our records.
• Every paper that names an enslaved person is also in the records of enslaved people, and the bills of sale and deeds of gift that the Register of Deeds’ compilation took from the will books link to their pages here. That compilation often names people Shields left unnamed.
• Shields and Chilton sometimes disagree about a date or a name, and in about twenty entries Shields’s dates put the probate before the will. Neither reading is corrected here; the will book settles it.
• Links to the county court minutes come from the minutes’ own references to the will books and from the will-proved entry for the same testator in the term the will was proved.
• The wills proved from 1846 to 1850 are listed by Shields with only the testator and the dates.

To report a misreading, write to us. Search the wills →