Deed records in probate records collection?

Hello, mbcross. Thanks for including the link. It explains your problem. You're not citing a deed. And it's not a "probate" record in the sense that most people today think of probate--i.e., the settlement of the estate of a deceased person. 

You're citing a court order from the court's order books. 

As background, deeds were drafted privately, or by/before a justice or notary or sometimes the county clerk.  But they needed to be officially recorded to safeguard the title to the property. The process in this time and place was for one of the parties to the deed to bring it into the local court and "prove" (aka probate) its legitimacy.

That probating of the deed would take one of two forms:

• The seller would "acknowledge" the deed (and in most states of this era, if the seller/grantor were married, the wife would be questioned separately to ensure that she 'voluntarily' relinquished her dower rights in the property); or
• Three of the witnesses would appear in court and attest that they witnessed this transaction and that the document is legitimate.

Once either of these were done, the court would accept the deed and order it to be recorded. Those court orders (sometimes called "court minutes") appear in the kind of register you are using here. 

A court order of this type alerts us that we should go to the deed books and find the actual document with all the details.

A court order of this type might also reference the probating of a will, for which the same "proof" process was followed.  Subsequent court orders would appoint administrators, accept "proved" inventories, annual accounts, and final settlements. These, too, would alert us to find the "wills and estates" books (or whatever title is used in the time and place) to study the actual documents that were created.

In our search for the actual deeds, we should also bear in mind a potential problem. Witnesses were typically used to prove a document when a seller had moved away before the deed was brought into court. In these cases, sometimes all three witnesses would come into court together, to prove the document. Sometimes, they could not all come at the same time. Thus, we have situations in which one or two witnesses would attest the document, but the court would not order the deed to be recorded in the deed books until and unless the other required witness(es) appeared at a later term to finalize the "proof" of the document.

In your draft citation, you've correctly identified the book from Image 3 of that series (Orders & Decrees, volume 1). However, the fact that this is a court order, rather than an actual deed, radically changes your wording in the Specific Item field. You do not want to leave the impression that you have used the actual deed. Also note four other things:

• The date to cite is the date of the court order because that's the actual record you are using. You don't also need to say that it's a court order because the title of the volume says that.
• Because your research note for this document would carry a full transcription of this court order (or your late narrative discussion of this person's life would report the details of the event), your citation would not repeat the content of the court order.  
• The access date needs to be included because websites are volatile; what's here today may be gone tomorrow.
• The path to get to the document needs to be included because typos easily happen amid the digits, letters, colons, slashes, and hyphens of a URL.

The result would be this:

Lincoln County, North Carolina, Superior Court, Orders and Decrees, vol. 1:539, 19 September 1876; imaged, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S7WF-3QVB-59 : accessed 6 August 2026) > North Carolina, Probate Records, 1735–1970 > Lincoln > image 318 of 347.