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Beaufort Co., NC Estate Records

Estate Records typically contain one or more of the following materials: Petitions for the division of lands, slaves and other property; Petitions for relief; Petitions for dower; Administrators' oaths and bonds; Receipts of handling of estates; Petitions by administrators for sales from estates; Accounts of sales of estates showing buyer and price; Personal letters; Bills to estates; Court petitions over administrators' disputes; Lunatic bonds; Applications for letters of administration; and numerous other miscellaneous materials.

We previously posted a file of the Beaufort County Estate Records found at the N.C. State Archives which was recently updated by the Archives Staff and transcribed by our volunteers Kitty Humphrey and Louise McLeod, who proofed the original list against the actual Archive folders.

However, this is not a complete list of all Beaufort County Estate Records. At some time in the past, and for some unknown reason, a number of Beaufort County records, including estates, were removed from the old Beaufort Courthouse and to the old Poor House in Little Washington for storage. Here they remained for some time and were later moved to the N.C. State Archives in Raleigh. However, since these records had been out of the hands of Beaufort County and N.C. State official, these records were designated "CRX" and considered "tainted", although most of them were most likely in perfect order. The official explanation is:

"CRX indicates that the records were, at some significant time in the course of their existence,
estrayed from the office in which they were created or filed, in the majority of cases either the
register of deeds or the clerk of one of the county courts. As a rule, these records came to the
Archives from some source other than these official custodians. As a result, the Archives cannot
certify that the information contained in these records was not altered or amended at some point
while they were out of custody. Of course, practically all of them were not in any way changed,
but from a legal point of view, we cannot absolutely attest to the content."

We are now in the process of posting online an index of the data contained in the CRX Boxes 134-183 of the Beaufort Co., NC Estates Records from the N.C. State Archives, Raleigh, NC. This data was transcribed in 1989 by the late John H. Oden, III, Sybble Smithwick and Louise M. Cowell. We are grateful to Louise Cowell for sharing this data with all Beaufort researchers.

Beaufort Co., NC Estates Page
Beaufort Co., NC Wills Page