Tennessee Genealogy

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Tennessee Genealogy Research Guide

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Tennessee Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Tennessee grew out of the western lands of North Carolina, was governed for six years as the Southwest Territory, and entered the Union in 1796 as the sixteenth state. Three things shape its records above all others: a land system inherited from North Carolina and never fully untangled, a civil registration that began late and then broke down entirely, and courthouse record loss on a scale matched by few states. Understanding all three is what separates productive Tennessee research from a dead end.

• Capital: Nashville. The seat of government moved repeatedly — Knoxville (1796–1812 and 1817–1818), Kingston for a single day in 1807, Nashville (1812–1817), and Murfreesboro (1818–1826) — before the General Assembly returned to Nashville in 1826 and made it the permanent capital in 1843.
• Statehood: June 1, 1796, the sixteenth state, formed from the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio (the Southwest Territory), which North Carolina had ceded in 1789–1790. An earlier attempt at self-government, the State of Franklin, held part of East Tennessee from 1784 to 1788.
• Counties: 95. Washington County, created by North Carolina in 1777, was the first and once covered the whole of present-day Tennessee; Chester County, in 1879, was the last. Two counties no longer exist: Tennessee County (1788–1796), divided into Montgomery and Robertson, and James County (1870–1919), absorbed into Hamilton.
• Grand Divisions: East, Middle, and West Tennessee are recognized in the state constitution and are more than geography — the land districts, the courts, and the settlement patterns all follow them, and a researcher should always know which division a county sits in.
• Land type: Tennessee is a state-land state, not a federal (public-domain) state, so there are no General Land Office records. Original title came first from North Carolina, which opened a land office for its western territory in 1777 and went on satisfying warrants there long after ceding the land, and then from the State of Tennessee under the Compact of 1806. Two states granting the same ground is the central fact of Tennessee land research.
• Nickname and motto: the Volunteer State, a name earned by the flood of volunteers raised for the Mexican War; the state motto is Agriculture and Commerce.
• Where records live: almost everything is a county record. Deeds are with the Register of Deeds; marriages and probate with the County Clerk; civil, criminal, and divorce cases with the Circuit Court Clerk; equity suits, and in some counties probate, with the Clerk and Master of the Chancery Court. Before the state required registration, the four large cities — Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Memphis — kept birth and death records of their own.

Libraries and Archives

Tennessee research runs through the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, which holds the land grants, the military records, and the vital-record indexes, and which has microfilmed the surviving records of nearly every county — a resource that matters enormously in a state where so many originals have burned. Regional collections in Knoxville, Memphis, and Chattanooga are strongest for their own ends of the state.

• Tennessee State Library and Archives (Nashville) — the central repository: land grants, entry and survey books, vital records past the confidentiality period, Confederate pension applications, the Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires, legislative records, manuscripts, newspapers, and microfilm of county records from across the state.
• TSLA Genealogy Index Search — free searchable indexes to many of those holdings, including death records, Confederate pensions, the Acts of Tennessee, Union Provost Marshal files, and penitentiary registers.
• Tennessee Virtual Archive (TeVA) — free digitized documents, photographs, maps, and records drawn from the Library and Archives collections.
• Tennessee Genealogical Society — the statewide society, publisher of Ansearchin’ News, with a research library near Memphis.
• Tennessee Historical Society — the state’s historical society; its manuscript collections are housed at the Library and Archives.
• East Tennessee Historical Society (Knoxville) — regional society and museum, and home of the First Families of Tennessee lineage program.
• Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library — the leading research collection for East Tennessee: local histories, genealogies, manuscripts, city directories, and county records.
• Nashville Public Library Special Collections — Nashville and Middle Tennessee; the Metropolitan Government Archives holds the original Davidson County and Nashville city records.
• Memphis Public Libraries — the Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, the main collection for West Tennessee.
• Shelby County Register of Deeds — free online indexes to Memphis and Shelby County births, deaths, marriages, naturalizations, and court records, together with a statewide death index.
• Chattanooga Public Library — local history and genealogy for Hamilton County and Southeast Tennessee.
• National Archives at Atlanta — the federal court, naturalization, census, and military records for Tennessee.
• University of Tennessee Libraries, University of Memphis Special Collections, and the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University — manuscripts, oral histories, and regional archives.
• Fisk University in Nashville and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center in Knoxville — the leading repositories for African American family and community history in the state.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive Tennessee microfilm and digital collections, and the county courthouses — County Clerk, Register of Deeds, Circuit Court Clerk, and Clerk and Master — hold the originals for their own areas.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Tennessee records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, the catalog, and large digitized collections of Tennessee vital, probate, church, military, and county records.
• Ancestry ($) — the largest body of Tennessee records online, including the vital, land, tax, probate, and census-substitute collections digitized from Library and Archives microfilm.
• MyHeritage ($) — Tennessee death, pension, and military indexes.
• Findmypast ($) — Tennessee marriage collections and published county histories.
• TSLA Genealogy Index Search — free; the state’s own searchable indexes to death records, Confederate pensions, the Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires, land grant maps, and much else.
• Tennessee Virtual Archive (TeVA) — free; digitized records, photographs, maps, and manuscripts from the state collections.
• Shelby County Register of Deeds — free; Memphis and Shelby County vital, court, and land indexes, plus a statewide death index.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive, with digitized Tennessee papers from across the state.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Tennessee histories, published record abstracts, county histories, and law books.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

Tennessee’s statutes explain why its records look the way they do — why divorces before 1834 sit among the legislative papers, why bound marriage books begin in 1838, why there are no birth or death records at all for 1913. The foundational volumes are digitized and free to read.

• Laws of the State of Tennessee, Including Those of North Carolina Now in Force in This State (Edward Scott, two volumes, 1821) — the essential early compilation, printing the North Carolina acts that governed the region before 1796, the acts of the Southwest Territory, the Cession Act, and the Compact of 1806; free on HathiTrust.
• The Statute Laws of the State of Tennessee, of a Public and General Nature (Haywood and Cobbs, 1831) — the standard revision of the state’s public acts to 1831; free on HathiTrust.
• The annual Acts of the State of Tennessee (the session laws) — free on HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. The private acts are the genealogically valuable half: before the courts took over, the legislature granted divorces, legitimated children, changed names, emancipated enslaved people, and redrew county lines, one family at a time.
• TSLA’s free Acts of Tennessee, 1796–1850: Index to Names — names every person named in the acts of the first half-century of statehood, and is the fastest route to a legislative divorce, legitimation, or emancipation.
• The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee (John Haywood, 1823) and The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (J. G. M. Ramsey, 1853) — free on the Internet Archive; the two contemporary histories that document the Watauga Association, the Cumberland Compact, the State of Franklin, and the territorial government.
• Goodspeed’s History of Tennessee (1886–1887) — free on the Internet Archive; county-by-county histories with thousands of biographical sketches of nineteenth-century families.
• The County Fact Sheets for Genealogists published by the Library and Archives set out, county by county, when the county was formed, from what parent county, and which of its records survive.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Tennessee’s civil registration began late and then collapsed. A state law required births and deaths to be registered from July 1908, but it lapsed at the end of 1912, so 1913 is a “dead year” — no birth or death records were kept at the state level that year at all. A new law took effect in 1914 and registration has continued since, though compliance was uneven until the later 1920s. Marriages are a different story: they are county records, and they reach back to a county’s creation.

Statewide records and access. Records that have passed the confidentiality period are held by the Tennessee State Library and Archives; more recent ones by the Tennessee Department of Health, Office of Vital Records. Births, including delayed births, are restricted for 100 years; deaths and marriages for 50. A fee applies for certified copies, and they are issued only to the person named and to certain family members.

• Deaths (statewide, 1908–1912 and from 1914): TSLA’s free Tennessee death records index covers 1908–1912 and 1914–1933. The certificates themselves are on Tennessee, U.S., Death Records, 1908–1965 ($), also indexed on MyHeritage ($), and free on FamilySearch as Tennessee Deaths, 1914–1966.
• Deaths (earlier): Tennessee Deaths and Burials, 1874–1955 is a free index drawn from church, cemetery, and county sources that predate state registration.
• Births (statewide, 1908–1912): Tennessee, Birth Records (Enumerator Record Series), 1908–1912 is free on FamilySearch. These were gathered by the clerk who took the school census in each district and forwarded to the county board of health.
• Delayed births (1869–1909): Tennessee, U.S., Delayed Birth Records, 1869–1909 ($). From 1935, Tennesseans born before registration began had to prove their age to claim Social Security, and the delayed certificates they filed — with Bible pages, affidavits, and church records attached as evidence — are often the only birth record a person ever had.
• Births (earlier): Tennessee, Births and Christenings, 1828–1939 is a free index built largely from church registers.
• Marriages: Tennessee, County Marriages, 1790–1950 is free on FamilySearch with images of the county registers, bonds, and licenses; Tennessee State Marriage Index, 1780–2002 is a free statewide index, and the same index with images is on Ancestry as Tennessee, U.S., Marriage Records, 1780–2002 ($).

Marriage records at the county. The County Clerk issued the license and recorded the return, and the earliest East Tennessee counties have bonds and licenses from the 1780s and 1790s. But counties were not required to record marriages in bound books until 1838, and about twenty counties have kept nothing earlier — so a missing marriage before 1838 is often a matter of what was retained rather than what was lost. Look for the bond and the minister’s return as well as the register, and check the neighboring county: couples crossed county and state lines freely to marry.

The four cities. Long before the state acted, Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Memphis registered births and deaths of their own — and they alone recorded them during the lost year of 1913.

• Deaths: Chattanooga from 1872, Nashville from 1874, Knoxville from 1881, and Memphis as early as 1848.
• Births: Memphis from 1874, Chattanooga from 1879, and Nashville and Knoxville from 1881.
• Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga records are digitized from the Library and Archives microfilm as Tennessee, U.S., City Birth Records, 1881–1915 ($) and Tennessee, U.S., City Death Records, 1872–1923 ($).
• Memphis and Shelby County are separate: the Shelby County Register of Deeds hosts free online indexes to Memphis births from 1874 and Shelby County deaths from 1848, and the originals are held by the Shelby County Archives and the Memphis-Shelby County Health Department.
• Davidson County, distinct from the city of Nashville, kept its own death records from 1900 to 1913; the free index is on the TSLA Genealogy Index Search.

Divorce. Before the constitution of 1834 a divorce could be granted only by an act of the General Assembly, so early divorces are found among the legislative acts and petitions at the Library and Archives — and in the Acts index described above. From 1834 the circuit and chancery courts granted divorces, and the case files are with those clerks.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Tennessee’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1540 — Hernando de Soto’s expedition crosses the region.
• 1756 — The British build Fort Loudoun among the Overhill Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee River.
• 1772 — Settlers on the Watauga River form the Watauga Association, one of the first self-governing communities west of the mountains.
• 1775 — Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company buys an enormous Cherokee claim, and Daniel Boone marks the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap.
• 1777 — North Carolina creates Washington County, covering all of present-day Tennessee.
• 1779–1780 — James Robertson and John Donelson found Nashborough (Nashville); the settlers adopt the Cumberland Compact.
• 1780 — The Overmountain Men march east and win the Battle of Kings Mountain.
• 1783 — North Carolina opens a land office for its western lands and sets aside a military reservation in Middle Tennessee to pay its Revolutionary soldiers.
• 1784–1788 — The State of Franklin governs part of East Tennessee before collapsing.
• 1789–1790 — North Carolina cedes its western lands, and Congress creates the Territory South of the River Ohio under Governor William Blount.
• June 1, 1796 — Tennessee is admitted as the sixteenth state, with the capital at Knoxville.
• 1806 — The Compact of 1806 gives Tennessee the right to issue land grants, draws the Congressional Reservation Line, and divides the state into surveyor’s districts.
• 1807 — Kingston is the state capital for a single day, honoring a promise made to the Cherokee.
• 1812–1826 — The capital shifts among Nashville, Knoxville, and Murfreesboro, returning to Nashville in 1826; it is made permanent there in 1843.
• 1818 — The Chickasaw Cession, negotiated by Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby, opens West Tennessee.
• 1819 — Memphis is founded, and the Hiwassee District is opened from the Cherokee cession.
• 1834 — A new constitution takes divorce out of the legislature and gives it to the courts, and establishes chancery courts across the state.
• 1836 — The Ocoee District, taken from the last Cherokee cession, is opened in Southeast Tennessee.
• 1838 — Cherokee removal: the Trail of Tears sets out from the internment camps in Southeast Tennessee. In the same year, counties are required for the first time to keep bound marriage books.
• 1861 — Tennessee secedes in June, the last state to join the Confederacy. East Tennessee remains strongly Unionist, and the state furnishes more Union soldiers than any other Confederate state.
• 1862–1865 — Fighting and occupation destroy the courthouse records of a number of counties, among them Monroe, Putnam, Stewart, Sullivan, Bedford, Claiborne, Hawkins, Perry, Hardeman, Hickman, and Dyer.
• 1866 — Tennessee is the first former Confederate state readmitted to the Union.
• 1878 — A yellow fever epidemic kills thousands in Memphis and drives out most of the population; the city loses its charter the following year.
• 1879 — Chester County, the last of the ninety-five, is created.
• 1908–1914 — Statewide birth and death registration begins, lapses at the end of 1912, and resumes in 1914.
• 1919 — James County is absorbed into Hamilton County.
• 1933 — The Tennessee Valley Authority is created; its reservoirs flood whole communities and relocate thousands of graves, generating detailed cemetery-removal records.
• 1942 — The federal government takes tens of thousands of acres in Anderson and Roane counties for Oak Ridge, displacing roughly a thousand families.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years from 1790 through 1950, but Tennessee’s early returns are largely gone. This is the defining problem of early Tennessee research, and it is why the tax and land records below carry so much weight.

• 1790 and 1800: lost entirely. Tennessee was the Southwest Territory in 1790 and a raw new state in 1800, and no schedules survive for either year.
• 1810: lost except for Rutherford County, which survives incomplete, and a portion of Grainger County.
• 1820: survives for Middle and West Tennessee, but every East Tennessee schedule is lost.
• 1830–1880 and 1900–1950: complete. They are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site, and searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).
• 1890: destroyed with the rest of the federal census in the 1921 fire. The special 1890 schedule of Union veterans and widows does survive for Tennessee, and matters here more than in most southern states.
• Slave schedules for 1850 and 1860 and mortality schedules for 1850 through 1880 survive and are indexed.

State censuses. Tennessee never took one. The territorial government counted its people in 1791 and again in 1795 — the 1795 enumeration returned 77,262 inhabitants and proved the territory had the 60,000 needed to apply for statehood — but only the totals survive, and no names were preserved. There is therefore no Tennessee equivalent of the state censuses taken elsewhere, and the substitutes below carry the entire weight of the gaps.

Census substitutes, in the order a researcher meets them:

• 1770–1790: Fulcher’s Census of the Cumberland Settlements reconstructs the households of the Davidson, Sumner, and Tennessee County settlements from petitions, tax lists, and court minutes — the closest thing to a census of Middle Tennessee’s founding families.
• 1783 onward: county tax lists are the single most important substitute, and survive for many counties from their earliest years. See Tax Records below.
• 1787–1791: McGhee’s Partial Census of 1787 to 1791 builds a name list from the North Carolina land grants issued for Tennessee land.
• 1810: Sherrill’s Reconstructed 1810 Census of Tennessee rebuilds a statewide name list from tax rolls and county records to stand in for the missing schedules.
• 1836: the tax lists of this year were taken across the state and are widely used as a mid-decade name list.
• 1891: the Tennessee, U.S., Enumeration of Male Voters, 1891 ($) lists the men of voting age in each county, some with their ages, and is the standard substitute for the destroyed 1890 census.
• 1914–1922: the Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires (see Military Records) place surviving veterans and describe their parents and grandparents.
• City directories for Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga run from the mid-1800s and can place a family on a particular street in a particular year.
• Tennessee, U.S., Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1810–1891 ($) gathers many of these printed lists into a single searchable index — a fast first pass before going to the originals.

Church Records

Because civil registration came so late, church records are the most important substitute for vital records for most of Tennessee’s history. Baptists were and remain the largest body, followed by Methodists; Presbyterians dominated the early East Tennessee settlements, and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized in Dickson County in 1810 out of the frontier revivals. Nashville became the publishing center of the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ. Quaker meetings in East Tennessee kept unusually complete registers of births, deaths, marriages, and removals, and are worth searching even for families only loosely connected to them. Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Jewish congregations grew with the cities.

• Tennessee, Church Records, 1816–1995 — free on FamilySearch; registers from congregations across the state.
• Tennessee Church Marriages, 1810–1965 — free; the ministers’ returns and church-recorded marriages, which often survive where the county register does not.
• U.S., Southern Baptist Church Records, 1750–1899 ($) — minutes, membership rolls, and disciplinary records, in which Tennessee is heavily represented.
• U.S., Presbyterian Church Records, 1701–1970 ($) — session minutes, baptisms, and membership rolls.
• Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (Nashville) — the denomination’s national archive, which also hosts the digitized run of the state Baptist paper, the Baptist and Reflector, carrying obituaries and church news from every corner of Tennessee.
• General Commission on Archives and History of the United Methodist Church — the denominational archive, with the Tennessee and Memphis conference records.
• Presbyterian Historical Society for the Presbyterian Church, and the Historical Foundation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, whose collections are held at Memphis Theological Seminary.
• Disciples of Christ Historical Society — the records of the Stone-Campbell movement, which was centered on Nashville.

Catholic parish registers are held by the diocesan archives at Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. The Library and Archives holds microfilm of hundreds of Tennessee congregational registers, and the WPA’s Guide to Church Vital Statistics Records in Tennessee identifies which congregations kept them and for what years — the place to start when the denomination is known but the congregation is not.

Court Records

Tennessee’s courts were reorganized several times, and their records reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, apprenticeships, naturalizations, road orders, bastardy bonds, and the emancipation of enslaved people. Knowing which court sat when is the key to finding the file.

• County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, from a county’s creation, later reconstituted as the Quarterly County Court — the workhorse: probate, guardianships, apprenticeships, tax lists, roads, and the appointment of local officials. Its records are kept by the County Clerk.
• Superior Courts of Law and Equity (1796–1809) — the territorial and early-state courts of record for major civil and criminal business; the surviving case files are at the Library and Archives rather than in the counties.
• Circuit Courts (from 1809) — replaced the Superior Courts; civil and criminal cases and, after 1834, divorce. With the Circuit Court Clerk.
• Chancery Courts (established across the state by the constitution of 1834) — equity: contested estates, partitions of land among heirs, foreclosures, and divorce. With the Clerk and Master. A chancery suit to divide a farm among the children will name every heir and often every grandchild, and in some counties the chancery court also holds probate jurisdiction.
• Supreme Court — the state’s appellate court since 1809. The Library and Archives index to its case files is searchable as Web: Tennessee, U.S., Supreme Court Case Index, 1809–1950 ($).
• Davidson and Shelby counties have separate probate courts, and their court records are held by the Metropolitan Government Archives in Nashville and the Shelby County Archives in Memphis rather than at the courthouse.

Before concluding that a court record never existed, check TSLA’s Lost Records: Courthouse Fires and Disasters in Tennessee: roughly sixty of the ninety-five counties have lost records to fire, war, tornado, or neglect, and several have burned more than once. The Library and Archives microfilm sometimes preserves a book whose original is gone, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search now makes many unindexed county minute books searchable by name.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Knowing where a group settled points directly to the records most likely to document a family.

• Cherokee. The Overhill towns on the Little Tennessee River — Chota and Tanasi, which gave the state its name — were the heart of the Cherokee Nation, and Cherokee territory covered East and Southeast Tennessee until the final cession of 1835 and the removal of 1838. The federal rolls are the essential records, and the National Archives describes and digitizes them: the Henderson Roll (1835), a census of the Cherokee still living east of the Mississippi; the Mullay (1848), Siler (1851), Chapman (1852), and Drennen (1852) rolls; the Hester Roll (1884); the Dawes Rolls (1898–1914) for those removed to Indian Territory; the Guion Miller Roll (1906–1911), whose applications trace ancestry back to the removal generation and are the richest genealogical source of all; and the Baker Roll (1924), the base roll of the Eastern Band. The Museum of the Cherokee People interprets the history.
• Chickasaw. The Chickasaw held West Tennessee until the cession of 1818. Their records are federal and tribal rather than county, and are found through the National Archives and the Chickasaw Nation.
• African Americans. People of African descent were in Tennessee from the first settlements. Before 1865 the principal records are the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules and the wills, inventories, deeds, and chancery suits of enslavers, in which enslaved people are named as property. After emancipation, the Tennessee, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, 1865–1872 — free on FamilySearch, with labor contracts, ration lists, school records, and marriages — and the Freedman’s Bank records (free; also on Ancestry ($)), whose Memphis and Nashville branches recorded a depositor’s birthplace, former enslaver, and whole family, are the two richest sources. Tennessee raised a large number of U.S. Colored Troops. Fisk University in Nashville and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center in Knoxville hold the leading community collections.
• Scots-Irish and German. The founding stock of East and Middle Tennessee came overland from Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and left ordinary county and church records rather than records of their own — which is why the church registers above matter so much for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
• Later colonies. Several planted settlements left distinct records: Wartburg in Morgan County, settled by Germans and Swiss from the 1840s; Gruetli in Grundy County, a Swiss colony of the 1860s; and Rugby in Morgan County, the English colony founded by Thomas Hughes in 1880, whose own archive survives.
• Melungeons. The mixed-ancestry families of Newman’s Ridge, in Hancock and Hawkins counties, are a genuine research problem as well as a community: the same family is classified white in one record, free person of color in the next, and mulatto in a third, so racial designations cannot be used to rule a family in or out. Court cases over voting and marriage rights, tax lists, and the censuses are the core sources, and the Hancock County Historical and Genealogical Society is the local repository.
• Jewish communities took root in Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville from the mid-1800s; congregational and community records are held locally and by the congregations themselves.

The Library of Congress Tennessee local history and genealogy guide gathers further ethnic and community resources, and the TVA relocated-cemeteries records — also on Ancestry as U.S., Tennessee Valley Cemetery Relocation Files, 1933–1990 ($) — document the thousands of graves, many of them in Black and rural family burying grounds, moved when the reservoirs filled.

Immigration and Naturalization

Tennessee has no seaport, and the overwhelming majority of its settlers arrived overland rather than at a port of entry. The main routes in were the Great Wagon Road down the Shenandoah Valley into East Tennessee, the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap, and the rivers — down the Holston and the Tennessee, and up the Cumberland to the Nashville settlements. Immigrants who later settled in Tennessee normally landed at an Atlantic or Gulf port — Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans above all — so an arrival record should be sought in the records of those ports rather than in Tennessee. Memphis, as a Mississippi River port, drew Irish and German labor directly in the nineteenth century, and the cities took in Italian, eastern European, and Jewish immigrants from about 1880.

Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record could naturalize — the county, circuit, and chancery courts as well as the federal courts — so Tennessee naturalizations are scattered, and they are frequently buried in the court minute books rather than kept in volumes of their own. After 1906 the process was standardized and the federal courts took it over.

• Tennessee, U.S., Naturalization Records, 1888–1992 ($) — declarations, petitions, and certificates from courts across the state.
• The National Archives at Atlanta holds the federal naturalization records for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Tennessee, including a Chattanooga index that reaches back to the 1820s.
• Naturalizations before 1906 are most often found in the minute books of the county, circuit, and chancery courts, which the Library and Archives has microfilmed county by county. FamilySearch Full-Text Search now makes many of those unindexed minute books searchable by name, which is by far the fastest way to find a declaration of intent buried among road orders and estate business.

Land Records

Tennessee is a state-land state, so there are no General Land Office records — but its land system is the most tangled of any state-land state, because two states granted the same ground. North Carolina opened a land office for its western territory in 1777 and kept satisfying warrants there long after ceding the land in 1789. The Compact of 1806 then authorized Tennessee to issue its own grants, on the condition that it honor every outstanding North Carolina civil and military warrant. Working out which government issued a grant, and in which district, is the first step in every Tennessee land problem.

The Compact of 1806 and the Congressional Reservation.

• The compact drew a Congressional Reservation Line across the state. The land east and north of it was turned over to Tennessee to grant, subject to the North Carolina warrants. The land west and south of it — all of West Tennessee and the southwestern corner of Middle Tennessee — was the Congressional Reservation, kept by the United States until Indian title was extinguished, and closed to entry in the meantime.
• Tennessee opened two land offices in 1806: one at Knoxville for East Tennessee, and one at Nashville for what was then called West Tennessee and is now Middle Tennessee. Boards of Commissioners in each half of the state ruled on whether a North Carolina warrant was valid.
• The state was divided into surveyor’s districts — eventually thirteen — and, unusually for a state-land state, much of the land was laid out in townships and ranges on the rectangular plan rather than by metes and bounds. Section 16 of each surveyed township was reserved to support schools.
• When Tennessee took over in 1806 it discovered that it had no records: a large North Carolina land fraud had caused the original entry and grant books to be subpoenaed back to North Carolina. Tennessee sent agents to copy them out, and those copies are the land-grant series held at the Library and Archives — which is why a grant for Tennessee land may exist in two states’ books at once.

The reservations and land districts. Knowing which district a tract fell in tells you which office issued the grant, whether North Carolina warrants applied, and where the surviving paperwork is.

• North Carolina Military Reservation (1783): a vast tract in Middle Tennessee set aside by North Carolina to pay its Continental Line soldiers, with acreage graded by rank. Very few soldiers ever settled on it — most sold their warrants to speculators — so the veteran named in a grant is usually not the man who lived on the land. Trace the warrant, not just the grant.
• Cumberland Compact settlements (1780): the Nashborough settlers came under the Transylvania Company’s 1775 purchase from the Cherokee. North Carolina voided Richard Henderson’s purchase, but the settlers’ pre-emption claims were honored, and the Cumberland Compact is the founding document of land title in Middle Tennessee.
• Hiwassee District (1819): opened in East Tennessee from the Cherokee cession, with a land office of its own and land sold largely by occupant entry. With the Ocoee District it was free of North Carolina warrants — one of the very few parts of the state where the North Carolina layer can be ignored altogether.
• Ocoee District (1836): the last Cherokee cession, in Southeast Tennessee, opened from a land office at Cleveland and sold cheaply to occupants; also free of North Carolina warrants, and largely dedicated to funding schools.
• Western District: everything west of the Tennessee River, opened after the Chickasaw Cession of 1818 — the Jackson Purchase, negotiated by Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby. This was the old Congressional Reservation, and once it opened, North Carolina warrants were laid on it, so a great many West Tennessee grants ultimately rest on service in the Revolution hundreds of miles away.
• Mountain District (1824): created for the Cumberland Plateau counties with a land office at Sparta, taking over much of the earlier third surveyor’s district.

Where the records are kept.

• County level: deeds and mortgages are recorded by the Register of Deeds in each county, and the deed books are usually the first records to be re-recorded after a courthouse fire, because title depended on them.
• Tennessee State Library and Archives: the grants themselves — the North Carolina grants for Tennessee land, the Tennessee grants, and the entry, survey, and warrant books copied out of North Carolina in 1806 — together with the district land-office records and land-grant maps. TSLA’s guide to the early North Carolina and Tennessee land grants explains how to follow a tract from entry through warrant and survey to the grant itself.
• North Carolina State Archives: the original North Carolina entries, warrants, and grant files for land that now lies in Tennessee — the other half of the paper trail.

Online, North Carolina and Tennessee, U.S., Early Land Records, 1753–1931 ($) and Tennessee, U.S., Early Land Registers, 1778–1927 ($) carry the grant and register series digitized from the Library and Archives, and North Carolina and Tennessee, U.S., Revolutionary War Land Warrants, 1783–1843 ($) covers the military warrants that lie behind so many Middle and West Tennessee titles. FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed deed books searchable by every name they contain — grantors, grantees, witnesses, and adjoining landowners — which is often the only way through a burned county.

Military Records

Tennessee earned its nickname in the field, and its military records are among the strongest the state has — with one crucial qualification: its Civil War records must always be searched on both sides. A Tennessee family that fought for the Union is not an anomaly.

• Revolution and the frontier: Tennessee’s settlers fought as the Overmountain Men at Kings Mountain in 1780 and in the Cherokee campaigns. Service was paid for in North Carolina bounty land — see North Carolina and Tennessee, U.S., Revolutionary War Land Warrants, 1783–1843 ($) — and Haywood’s and Ramsey’s histories name the frontier companies.
• War of 1812 and the Creek War: Tennessee volunteers under Andrew Jackson fought at Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans. The free TSLA Genealogy Index Search includes an index to War of 1812 pensioners for Tennessee, both soldiers and widows.
• Mexican War (1846–1848): the call for 2,800 volunteers drew tens of thousands of Tennesseans and fixed the state’s nickname for good.
• Civil War: Tennessee raised something like a hundred and thirty thousand men for the Confederacy, and more for the Union than any other Confederate state — chiefly from East Tennessee — along with a large number of U.S. Colored Troops. Service records are free on FamilySearch for Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers alike, and are also on Fold3 ($).
• The Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires (1914–1922) are the outstanding Tennessee source. The State Archivist sent forms to surviving veterans of both armies, and the roughly 1,650 that came back describe parents and grandparents, the farm, schooling, whether the family owned enslaved people, and the men’s own accounts of the war — genealogical and social detail found nowhere else. The index is free at the Library and Archives.
• Confederate pensions: Tennessee pensioned Confederate veterans from 1891 and their widows from 1905, and kept a separate roll for Black men who had served the Confederate armies as servants and laborers. The Tennessee Confederate Pension Applications index is free; the applications are on FamilySearch (free, with images), on Ancestry ($), and on MyHeritage ($).
• Other Civil War records: the Confederate Soldiers’ Home applications and ledgers, the Union Provost Marshal files, and the Civil War burial sheets are all indexed free on the TSLA Genealogy Index Search. Lindsley’s Military Annals of Tennessee (1886) prints Confederate regimental histories and rosters, free on the Internet Archive.
• World War I: the draft registration cards reach nearly every Tennessee man of age, and the Library and Archives adds free indexes to its Gold Star Records, for those who died, and its World War I Veterans’ Questionnaires; a Tennessee WWI veterans index is also on MyHeritage ($).
• County discharge records: veterans of the twentieth-century wars filed their discharges with the county, and Tennessee, Military Discharge Records, 1861–1967 is free on FamilySearch.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, inventories, sale bills, guardianships, and final settlements — is the richest single source for Tennessee family relationships. It has always been a county record: there is no colonial layer and no central probate court to search, so an estate was proved where the person died.

• The County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, later the Quarterly County Court, held probate jurisdiction from a county’s creation, and its records are kept by the County Clerk.
• In some counties the Chancery Court was later given probate jurisdiction, and those records are with the Clerk and Master. Davidson and Shelby counties have separate Probate Courts.
• The estate file — petition, will or letters of administration, bond, inventory, sale bill, and the final settlement dividing the residue among the heirs — names far more people than the will book alone, and is worth pursuing even where a will was recorded. The sale bill in particular lists the neighbors who bought the dead man’s goods, and the final settlement lists the heirs by name, including married daughters under their new surnames.
• Where a courthouse burned, look for the estate in the surviving records of the adjoining counties, in chancery suits brought to divide the property, and in the Library and Archives microfilm, which sometimes preserves a book whose original is gone.

Online, Tennessee, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1779–2008 ($) is name-searchable across most counties, and Tennessee Probate Court Books, 1795–1927 and Tennessee Probate Court Files, 1795–1955 are free on FamilySearch — the files being the loose papers, which are far more informative than the bound books. FamilySearch Full-Text Search searches unindexed wills and estate papers by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Tax lists do more work in Tennessee than in almost any other state, because they stand in for the censuses that were lost. Tennessee taxed land by the acre and taxed free polls — men between twenty-one and fifty — so a man normally appears on the list the year he turns twenty-one and drops off it when he dies, moves away, or passes fifty. Read several consecutive years side by side and the tax list becomes a rough annual census of a district: it will show you a son coming of age, a widow taking over the land, and an estate being divided.

• Tennessee, U.S., Early Tax List Records, 1783–1895 ($) — the largest single collection, digitized from the county tax books at the Library and Archives. The earliest lists predate any surviving census for the state, which makes this the first place to look for a pre-1830 Tennessee ancestor.
• U.S., IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) — the Civil War income, license, and luxury taxes, which reach a broad slice of the adult population in the years around the war and can place a man in a county when little else does.
• The Tennessee State Library and Archives holds the county tax books on microfilm; the originals, where they survive, remain with the county. Printed abstracts of the earliest East and Middle Tennessee tax lists are widely available and are worth checking first.
• FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed county tax and court books searchable by name, which is the most effective way to work a burned county where the tax books survive but the deeds and wills do not.