State Library of North Carolina adds digitized collection of family Bibles

North Carolina genealogists! Do I have a treat for you. The State Library of North Carolina and the North Carolina State Archives have created a new digital collection: North Carolina Family Records Online. This new resource is available at http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/dimp/digital/ncfamilyrecords/ and contains almost 220 family Bible records as well as all six volumes of the Marriage and Death Notices from Raleigh Register and North Carolina State Gazetteer: 1799-1893.

You can browse the collection, if you like (it's divided up into families, so you could browse any of the record collections from the "A. E. S. Lindsey Family Bible Records" to the "Zeno Columbus Johnson Family Bible Records.") You can search by keyword, but I found browsing to be a bit less confusing. You can also search for information on a map. I thought that was a good idea, but it ended up being really confusing in practice so I gave up on it.

I picked, at random, the "Foy Family Bible Records" to look at. This particular set of records only has five pages. You'll get some details about the records (what time period they cover, relevant keywords, and so on) along with images of the pages. Note that the images provided are usually much smaller than actual size; use the zoom tool in the top middle of the page to get closer to page text. (You can also use the "page & text" option in the left navigation to get full transcriptions of pages.)

This particular collection started a wedding in 1777 and also included pages of births, marriages, and deaths. Considering everything was handwritten it was fairly easy to read -- I didn't even have to zoom in or look at transcriptions most of the time.

I had more trouble using the Marriage and Death Notices from the Raleigh Register. These volumes are tossed with the Bible records, but since they're so extensive they're harder to review as I reviewed the five-page Foy records. Instead you can search by keyword. I had no trouble searching by keyword, but I did have trouble viewing the information I found. The collection wanted to kick me out a PDF of each page, but these PDFs weren't well formed -- it was about fifteen name halves lined up on a page. Not even any of the ones I was looking for.

I found myself using the "page & text" option a lot in this instance to find my keyword in the text transcripts.

The State Archives admits that this selection of Bible records is nowhere near complete -- it's about 10% of the Archive's family Bible records. On the other hand, this appears to be only the beginning; the Archives are soliciting people with family Bible records having at least one date occurring before 1913 to submit their records for possible digitization. For more details see the project's about page.

What a rich source for genealogists this project could be! If only I could get a little better about searching the Raleigh Registers....