The Manteo Library and the Hatteras Library each have North Carolina Reference collections of books and other materials that cannot be borrowed from the libraries, nor sent to another library for in-house use. This means if you see a title in our online catalog with a “NC REF” notation by the call number, you will need to go to the owning library location to view it.

The Manteo Library also contains the Gregory Williams Outer Banks Genealogy Collection, which was donated to the library by Gregory Wilson Williams’ parents, Cary Trafton Williams and Hilda (Austin) Williams. This collection consists of hundreds of family name pedigree charts, over 60 books and journals, correspondence, and numerous county government and federal census records of Dare, Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank, Hyde, Tyrrell and Carteret counties that pertain to Outer Banks family names, including births, marriages, deaths, pensions, wills and estates. The bulk of his research covers the mid-1700s to mid-1990s. An index of this collection is available online and on-site at the Manteo Library. 

In addition, the Manteo Library is home to a local history collection in hanging, vertical files that include newspaper clippings, printed materials, ephemera and small publications. An index of these items is available to view online and on-site at the Manteo Library. 

The Dare County Library offer two commercial databases as well as an online collection of historical materials.

Dare County Digital Heritage Collection

The Dare County Digital Heritage Collection contains an online digital archive and searchable index covering over 70 years of past issues of the Dare County Times (1935-1945) and The Coastland Times (1951-2009), newspapers that documented life on the Outer Banks, North Carolina during this historic period. Funding for this project is from the Outer Banks Community Foundation and the Dare County Library, as well as through an agreement between Times Printing Company, Inc. (publisher of the Dare County Times and The Coastland Times) and the Dare County Library.

The Dare County Digital Heritage collection also includes an online digital archive and searchable index of typed pages of family name genealogy contained in the Gregory Williams Outer Banks Genealogy Collection and the award-winning student magazine, Sea Chest, that covers Hatteras Island culture and history.

For a subject and name index of the print and digitized Gregory Williams Outer Banks Genealogy Collection, click here.

NC Digital Heritage Center 

The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program housed at UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library. They work with North Carolina cultural heritage institutions. such as Dare County Library, to scan, describe, and publish historical materials online, which in turn increases access to and use of their collections. We are North Carolina’s hub for the Digital Public Library of America. The Center is supported by the State Library of North Carolina with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, and by the UNC-Chapel Hill University Library.

The Coastland Times

Cape Hatteras School Sea Chest Magazine

Beginning or professional genealogists can access original page images for all documents: a collection of over 25,000 family and local histories as well as U.S. Census records.

HeritageQuest can be accessed from any home office or work computer. You will need your 14-digit Dare County Library card number in order to access HeritageQuest from outside the library.

Beginning or professional genealogists can access Ancestry.com, the largest collection of family histories on the internet. This also includes U.S. Census records, genealogy links, family trees and printable family tree chart forms. Ancestry - Library Edition can only be used at a library computer and cannot be accessed from home or office.

The Digital Library on American Slavery (DLAS) is an expanding resource compiling independent collections focused upon race and slavery in the American South, made searchable through a single, simple interface. DLAS houses tens of thousands of records relating to all 15 slave states and Washington, D.C. as well as a number of northern states. DLAS contains detailed personal information about over 100 thousand individuals, including enslaved people, enslavers, free people of color, and more.

The goal of the Digital Library on American Slavery is to bring together and make freely accessible public records related to enslavement, with an emphasis upon the names and stories of the enslaved. DLAS strives to be a documentation project, not an interpretive effort. The team works with researchers to make data sets available for personal research.

Each project housed within DLAS includes a data dictionary and user guide tailored to that data set or type of record. A detailed history of each project is also available.

Included documents and datasets

Court petitions (The Race and Slavery Petitions Project)

The Race and Slavery Petitions Project is based upon the research data of Dr. Loren Schweninger and offers data extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The project contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, as well as from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 enslaved people, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both enslavers and not.

Runaway slave notices (The N.C. Runaway Slave Advertisements Project)

This project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 5000 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1865. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. The project includes digital images, full-text transcripts, and descriptive metadata, as well as contextual essays and an annotated bibliography.

Slave deeds (People Not Property)

People Not Property is a unique, centralized database of bills of sales from across over 20 North Carolina counties, Washington DC, and other states. The project indexes the names of enslaved people from across the state, and includes robust metadata, images, and searchable indexes. This is an ongoing effort, and the project will continue to expand to other counties across North Carolina as well as into other states and districts.