Orange County, North Carolina · Est. 1752
Cartographic tools & historical research for the landscapes that shaped us
2026 Award for Excellence North Carolina Genealogical Society— Portfolio of Works —
Historical Web Map
Over 8,000 colonial and state land grant polygons reconstructed from original survey records — the cadastral fabric of Orange County from its founding in 1752.
Deed Abstract Database
Full-text searchable abstracts of the earliest deed books of Orange County and the six of counties later erected from it (down to about 1805) — over 28,000 individual land transactions, indexed by name and place.
Historical Web Map · Hydrology
All named rivers, creeks, and branches within Orange County's original boundaries (as it was in 1752) — reconstructed from colonial surveys, old maps, and occasionally personal interviews.
GIS Field Research Tool
Using LiDAR terrain analysis and geodesic viewshed modeling to locate forgotten enslaved burial grounds in Orange County — a phone-based field tool for cemetery prospecting in the plantation landscape.
Web Mapping Application
An interactive LiDAR hillshade mapping tool for historical field research — land grants, cemeteries, geomorphons, and the hidden landscape of Orange County.
Historical Web Map
A geographic history of residential segregation, environmental racism, and Jim Crow in Chapel Hill, NC.
Historical Web Map · Deed Research
The Kirkland family's historic homeplace in Hillsborough, mapped through its original deed chain — with biography pages documenting the enslaved people, free people of color, and white families whose lives intersected on this landscape.
Georeferencing Tool
A browser-based tool for georeferencing historical maps — align scanned plats and survey maps to modern coordinates using control points and affine transformation.
Field Documentation Tool
A browser-based map displaying features collected from geotagged photos taken in the field — linking images to place.
Coordinate System
A global (r, θ) coordinate system with no arbitrary or colonial origin — anchored at the South Pole, with its prime meridian derived astronomically from the sub-solar point at equinox rather than inherited from any national survey.
Cartographic Engineering
A custom slippy map that rotates through twenty-four Mercator projections to keep every point on Earth — the poles included — inside a low-distortion band, with a hand-built compass rose and a tile system that halves its own storage by deriving one hemisphere's tiles from the other's.
Counter-Cartography · Environmental Justice
A counter-map of Enbridge's proposed Chatham County System Expansion pipeline, built from crowd-sourced field data since the company has never published a real route — naming the cemeteries, historic Black churches, rivers, and endangered species habitat that its own map leaves out. Narrated as an audio-guided tour.
Deed Abstract Database · Genealogical Search
A searchable database of nearly 2,000 Orange County records of the sale and transfer of enslaved people — abstracted from Deed Books and loose Bills of Sale (at the Archives in Raleigh). Search by the name of an enslaved person or an enslaver, with direct links to the original scanned deed page.
In Development
New cartographic and historical research projects are in progress — including spatial analysis of Free People of Color communities, historical deed mapping, and PhD research on the spatial organization of slavery.
Former Register of Deeds for Orange County, North Carolina, now a doctoral student in Geography at UNC Chapel Hill. For thirty years I have been reconstructing the cadastral landscape of this corner of the Piedmont — tracing land grants and deeds, trying to connect freedom papers, sales & other legal records of enslaved people, and indigenous geographies through the language of metes and bounds. These maps are an attempt to make that history visible.
