Iredell Co. to launch website listing slave transactions from 1700s

IREDELL COUNTY, N.C. — Iredell County officials are hoping to launch an online, innovative way to link the past to present.

"Basically, all of this history has been buried and has not been in an accessible format until now," said Iredell Register of Deeds representative Matt McCall.

Inside hundreds of books and thousands of pages are lists of all property transactions in the county.

"In those records, you can find transactions when people were treated as property and bought or sold," said McCall.

For people looking to trace their ancestry, it could be a long lost link to the past.

"It's interesting, because in some cases this could be the only trace we have that those persons ever existed," McCall.

McCall said more than 10 years ago, a historian broke down the transaction records in the books.

Over the last several months, McCall and his staff sorted through the abstracts created by the historian and found more than 2,500 instances of slaves bought and sold in Iredell County between 1788 and 1865, or the end of the Civil War.

Now, if someone is looking to trace their lineage and may have ancestors who were once slaves, they will be able to go online, type in a first or last name and see if there are any matches.

They can find out who their relatives were, who owned them, who they were sold to and for how much and when.

"It's not full proof, but there's a lot more history available now and a lot easier to access format than what it was before," said McCall.

Then if they want, they can also find the original documents in these books and read the original piece of paper linking them to the past.

"To see the actual document, the original document that bought or sold your great, great grandparent. That's a powerful thing," said McCall.

County officials are hoping to launch the site by June 19.

Eyewitness News will keep you updated on when the system is launched. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with breaking news.

WSOC