The primary documents of North Carolina's history from 1662 to 1790 were transcribed and compiled into two state-sponsored publications, The Colonial Records of North Carolina and The State Records of North Carolina.

The Colonial Records of North Carolina were issued in ten (10) volumes from 1886 to 1890 and were edited by William L. Saunders, Secretary of State of North Carolina from 1879 to 1891. This important set of books contains transcribed versions of documents found both within North Carolina and in England, covering the period of 1662 to 1775. Mr. Saunders kept numerous documents in his office - the Secretary of State was responsible for safekeeping the records of the General Assembly and other government departments at this time in history. Some records were retained in the court houses of older counties such as Pasquotank, Perquimans, and Chowan. Original documents in England were kept mostly in the Public Records Office in London and were transcribed under the direction of W. Noel Sainsbury, keeper of the records and an editor of the documentary series Calendar of State Papers, Colonial.

The State Records of North Carolina were published in sixteen (16) volumes between 1895 and 1905 and were compiled and edited by Walter Clark, a sitting Justice (1889 to 1903) of the North Carolina Supreme Court and then Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court (1903 to 1924). Many of these documents were maintained in various state offices, and Mr. Clark traveled outside of North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Washington, DC, in search of others. Additionally, repositories in England, particularly the Public Records Office, furnished a number of important documents.

Stephen B. Weeks, a former professor at Trinity College and collaborator with Mr. Clark in the collection of material to be printed, prepared a four-volume index to both series, which was published between 1909 and 1914. These indexes proved to be invaluable in helping later researchers.

Legislative authorization for publication of these valuable records came in 1881 in the form of a resolution prepared by William L. Saunders and endorsed by Governor Thomas J. Jarvis. The resolution permitted the publication of documents dating back to January 1, 1781 "belonging to the State of North Carolina" and entrusted the task to the trustees of the North Carolina State Library, two of whose three members were Mr. Saunders and Governor Jarvis. In 1883, another resolution allowed the procurement and publication of any documents of the Colonial era that were "missing from the archives of the state." In 1895 and 1901, the North Carolina General Assembly extended the terminal date for published material from 1781 to 1791 to include the 1790 U.S. Census for North Carolina.

Publication of the 28,840 pages comprising the multiple volumes of these records for the first time permitted the critical writing of the early history of the State, and the series remains to be a critical source for any serious scholarship of the period before 1790.

Since these documents are in the "public domain," and no longer under copyright protection, they have been republished in their entirety by Broadfoot Publishing Company. They offer all 30 volumes in 28 hardcopy books (the Indexes have been consolidated from four volumes down to two volumes) for $1,500.00, and they can be purchased online at:

http://www.broadfootpublishing.com

This Author has managed to find all of these important volumes online in digital form. Some have pages missing, beats me why. I created one volume (Volume XII) from scatch and it took forever to create. Clyde Holland found Volume XVI in October of 2022, thank you, Sir!

The University of North Carolina has all volumes transcribed into useable raw text online, and each volume can be found at:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/volumes.

Finally, if you wish to view or download PDF versions of what this Author has found, just click on the Volume # below.