The purpose of this study is to design and evaluate an individual instance-based ontology retrieval system for archival records of the "Saemaul Movement". We used Protege editor 4.1 to design an individual instance-based ontology. To evaluate the proposed ontology retrieval system, five short queries and ten narrative queries were used and compared their precision and recall against the NARA keyword-based retrieval system. The performance results showed that the individual-based ontology retrieval system outperformed the keyword-based retrieval system in terms of the measurement of precision and recall.