NC Historical Records Online is happy to announce that our project for digitization of the NC land grant loose documents, a.k.a. “the shucks”, has been a huge success so far! In the past month we received over $6,000 in donations which will purchase 392 reels of microfilm containing over 400,000 images. Donations came from 76 individuals with amounts varying from $16 for 1 reel to $896 for 56 reels, plus additional donations to help keep the website up and running. Once everything is digitized we will have around 60% of the available loose documents on the NC Land Grants website. Many thanks to everyone who donated, and we especially thank “The Legal Genealogist” Judy Russell for her posts “Buy Some Land” and “Links in the Family Chain” which provided the publicity needed to accomplish this. Donors will receive information for tax purposes at the end of the year.
Now for the not-as-good news. The actual digitization is handled by the State Archives of NC, who generously provides this service to the public at a reasonable cost, considering the work involved. They have started digitizing, but this order is much bigger than normal and they have a limited budget and staffing for this service. We’ve worked out a process with them so we can get these reels digitized as quickly as possible while also not monopolizing their pipeline. Even so, it will be several months before the current order is completed, so your patience is greatly appreciated! We will post information as new counties are added to the website.
There are still many counties that have not been funded, especially in the Southeastern part of the state. We are still accepting donations for the remaining 40%, so if you are interested visit http://info.nclandgrants.com/shucks , but please note it will be a while before those images are online.
We are also very interested in getting in touch with people who have previously purchased DVDs of these or any other records from the State Archives of NC. If you would like to share your images with everyone for free we can put these on our website. We’ve received about 100 reels so far from several individuals, but there are many many more out there. Please visit http://nchistoricalrecords.org/reels/ for more information.
As always, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, comments, etc.