I’ve had to take a break from research for the past few months because I’ve been so busy with work, but knowing we’ll all be hunkering down for much of the coming weeks, I thought last night was a perfect time to get back to research. 

I was thrilled to see the North Carolina Digital Collections now has General Assembly Session Records online. 

I’m not sure if they have all of them posted yet, but they definitely had the 1810 Session records, which includes the Private Act which changed my ancestor Laban Morris’s name, along with his sons John and William.

Click here to check out the records.

Don’t expect to find every name mentioned via the search box. The documents aren’t all transcribed and there are only brief summaries written up for what’s in each collection.

If you know your ancestor had some action taken up by the GA or if you just want to browse to see what’s there, a great way to do it would be to check the Dates or Subjects filters over in the left-hand column. 

For anyone who has followed the Laban Morris history, here are the exact pages from December 1810 when the name changes of him and his sons, along with several other North Carolinians, were written into the record. You can see how I long struggled to determine whether or not the written version of his name is “Labon Henley” [Laban Henley] or “Labon Henby.” [Laban Henby] Now that I have access to this clearer file (much better than the hurried snapshot I obtained years ago!) I think it should be HENBY and genealogy expert Victor T. Jones agrees with me.