City of Greensboro Municipal Records

The city of Greensboro  maintains a searchable database that is composed of three general types of record: marriages, obituaries, and gravestone inscriptions.  It also includes information on more than 19,000 Guilford County, North Carolina, men and women who served during World War II.

• Burial Index:  includes interments in the three municipal cemeteries operated by the City of Greensboro -- Forest Lawn, Green Hill, and Maplewood Cemeteries. It includes details of more than 35,000 burials and is a continuously updated and growing list.

• Marriage, Obituary & Gravestone Marker Search: includes records derived from the weekly newspaper, Greensboro-Patriot from 1826-99, Guilford County marriage bonds, and the three-volume set North Carolina Tombstone Records, by John S. Welborn, published in 1935/36. 

• WWII Service Personnel and Civil War Records: includes information on more than 19,000 Guilford County, North Carolina, men and women who served during the Civil War and World War II. All services are represented. The vast majority of entries are for the Army, Army Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Coast Guard, Merchant Marines, WAAC/WAC, WAVES, Army & Navy Nurse Corps, and various civilian services, such as the Red Cross, are also represented.

 African Americans of Guilford County

• African Americans in Greensboro's 1880 Census: includes a partial list of African American households from Greensboro's U.S. Census of 1880.

• African Americans in the 1887 Greensboro City Directory: includes  a complete list of African Americans in the Greensboro City Directory of 1887. As the 1890 U.S. Census was destroyed by fire in 1921, this directory (as well as others from this period) may be of particular relevance to researchers.

• Union (African American) Cemetery: includes a list of burials with grave markers (there are many unmarked graves).  (This list was first published in Family Burying Grounds and Abandoned Church Cemeteries in Guilford County, N.C., and Immediate Environs, compiled by O. Norris and Rebecca H. Smith, Guilford County Genealogical Society, 1994.)

• Article About Historic Warnersville: This article describes the development of Warnersville, a community created after the Civil War for recently freed, and then homeless and impoverished former slaves.

Colonial Court Records of Guilford County

The Guilford County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions is a primary source of early local history. It documents not only land transactions, wills, and criminal cases, but also slave manumissions, Loyalist land confiscations, and the daily workings of early Guilford County. Records contain information on thousands of our early residents, their families and their occupations.

This is the first time transcriptions of this resource have been available online. Select from any of these time periods:

• 1781-1790
• 1791-1800
• 1801-1811

Although the British burned records of 1771-1781, these remaining 900-plus pages can still tell you a great deal about who our residents were, what they did, how they got along (or didn’t), and how people of various ethnic and religious beliefs formed their communities.

The following are local sources compiled by other organizations.

• Greensboro City Directories, 1879-1968: The Greensboro City Directories for 1884-1963 have been digitized by the Digital Projects Unit at UNCG from copies held by the UNCG University Libraries, the Greensboro Public Library, and the Greensboro History Museum.

• North Carolina Yearbooks: Provided by DigitalNC, browse High School and College/University yearbooks in Greensboro and Guilford County.  

• Historic North Carolina Digital Newspaper Collection: Provided by NCLIVE and Newspapers.com, search through 3.5 million pages of digitized content from over 1,000 NC county newspapers.