“Kept By the Register of Deeds: The Life History Could Be Your Own,” David Witherspoon, Wilson Daily Times, 24 August 1963.

This paragraph from an article about Wilson County’s Record of Deeds Office asserts that the first entry in county death records was for a three month-old African-American girl.

The town of Wilson began recording sporadically in 1909, and the county followed in 1913. However, as digitized in Ancestry.com’s database of North Carolina death certificates, Wilson County’s first death of 1913, recorded January 1 of that year, was for two day-old A.L. Darden Jr., a white child. In fact, the death certificate this article describes is nowhere to be found in the digital database in the month of January.