Research and explore your South Carolina genealogy and family history online with these online South Carolina databases, indexes and digitized records collections - many of them free!
The Piedmont Historical Society provides transcriptions of a number of South Carolina records, primarily focused on the upstate counties including Abbeville, Anderson, Cherokee, Chester, Edgefiled, Fairfield, Greenville, Greenwood, Laurens, McCormick, Newberry, Oconee, Pickens, Spartanburg, Union and York.
This free online index of historical records from the SC Archives includes will transcripts (1782-1855), plats for state land grants, Confederate pension applications and other items.
Greenville County, South Carolina, has posted an amazing collection of the county's historical records online in digital format, including deeds, wills, probate records and district court records. The records are in digital format only, but the indexes (when available) have also been digitized.
Historic photographs, broadsides (single page advertisements such as posters and fliers), family papers, Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and historic newspapers from across the state of South Carolina are online as part of the University of South Carolina Libraries Digital Collections.
Browse digitized indexes of all Death Index log files from the South Carolina Department of Health's Division of Vital Records. Viewable only with Internet Explorer.
The online Archival Room has opened with several hundred digitized plats of Charleston area plantations prior to 1900, along with McCrady Plats and Gaillard Plats. Plans are to eventually digitize older deeds, mortgages and other documents and put them online as well (more recent deeds are currently earchable online through the
Register of Deeds Office).
Richland County, which includes the state capital Columbia, offers online searching of marriage licenses filed from July 1911 through the present and estates filed from 1983 to the present.
Marriage records, obituaries, cemetery records, death certificates, bible records, wills, high school family class lists, land records, wills and other genealogical records are freely available online from the Horry County Historical Society
Browse estate indexes (1865-1994) and marriage indexes (1911-1987) through the
Probate Court and deed index books (1949-1984) through the
Register of Deeds.
This free online index from the Beaufort County Library covers obituaries appearing in newspapers of the old Beaufort District of South Carolina (Beaufort, Jasper and Hampton counties) from 1862-1984. Includes links and information for how to order a copy of the actual full-text obituary.
