Tennessee NewsPapers

The Tennessee State Library and Archives has a large collection of newspapers and an incomplete card index to marriage and death notices published in Nashville newspapers. One published compilation of data extracted from eight Tennessee newspapers is Sherida K. Eddlemon, comp., Genealogical Abstracts from Tennessee Newspapers, 1791–1808 (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1988).

A guide to newspaper collections is Tennessee Newspapers: A Cumulative List of Microfilmed Tennessee Newspapers in the Tennessee State Library, 1978 Progress Report. Nashville, Tenn.: Tennessee State Library and Archives, 1978. Newspaper Microfilms are loaned to Tennessee libraries. Individual reels may also be purchased.  An Inventory of Newspapers on Microfilm at TSLA is available on our web site.

While records of birth, marriage, and death are the most commonly sought and the most consistently helpful records, only the genealogist’s imagination and resourcefulness limit newspapers’ usefulness in supplying clues about historical events, local history, probate court and legal notices, real estate transactions, political biographies, announcements, notices of new and terminated partnerships, business advertisements, and notices for settling debts.

Newspapers can provide at least a partial substitute for nonexistent civil records. For example, a person’s obituary may have appeared in a newspaper even when civil death records for that person do not exist. And newspapers are an important source of marriage records, particularly in those states where civil recording of marriages was essentially nonexistent until the twentieth century.

Unlike official records, newspapers are not limited to a particular geographical area. They often include reports of the weddings of local citizens (even those that occurred in a neighboring county or another state), and they sometimes report visits of geographically distant relatives or the visits of former local residents. They often published death notices of individuals who had left the area long before but who still had local family or friends as well. In each case the newspaper account can identify the date and place of an event, thus opening the possibility of turning up additional documentation in other sources.

Search Tennessee Historical Records - Databases include Court, Land, Wills & Financial Records; Birth, Marriage & Death Records; Voter Lists & Census Records; Immigration & Emigration Records; Obituary Records; Military Records; Family Tree Records; Pictures; Stories, Memories & Histories; Directories & Member Lists and much more....

The first step in searching a newspaper is to identify those which served the area of interest and which have survived. The three most necessary tools are bibliographies (What was published?), inventories of library and depository holdings (Where is it?), and indexes (How do I find what I want in it?).

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