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The volunteers at the Archives have finished the processing of the Chancery Court case files. While the Chancery Court minute books and dockets survive back to 1865, few of the corresponding case files survive prior to 1925. The Chancery case files at the Archives mostly span from 1930-1970. Later case files are still held by the Clerk and Master's office.
Cases heard in Chancery Court often involved the sale of family farms, and required every member of the family to be identified in order to determine each heir's share of the sale proceeds. For this reason, Chancery case files can be very genealogically rich, tracing the ancestors and the family's history of ownership of the farm, and can span dozens or sometimes hundreds of pages. The Chancery Court case files have not been digitized, and likely won't be for years to come, but they are available for research during Archives' business hours. Individual files can be digitized on request. The case file index can be viewed from the Records page of the Archives' website.
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Now online at the Stewart County Archives website:
County Court Minute Book, 1804-1807 (typed version) Settlements and Bonds Book, 1804-1807 (typed version) These typewritten transcriptions were created circa 1940s to preserve the original 1804-1807 County Court Minute book and 1804-1807 Settlements and Bonds book. The original Minute Book has been accessible on microfilm for decades (and now FamilySearch), but the Settlements and Bonds book has never been microfilmed due to its fragile condition; its contents were only available in a 1936 transcription made by the WPA and accessible at the State Library and Archives. Of special note in the Settlements and Bonds book are eighteen marriage bonds from 1804-1805. They are the only surviving marriage records in the county before 1838. Scans of these two typed books are now available via the Records page of the Archives website Pictured with principal R. E. Gorham. Only some of the class members have been identified in the photo: Ruth Brandon (top row, 4th from left) Jewel Byrd Mavis Byrd Stella Coulter Maud Crow (front row, 3rd from right) Carmen Herndon Everett Hysmith Vertrees Keel Fitzhugh Lancaster (middle row, 2nd from left) Anna Largent Ruth Settle Ruby Tubbs (top row, 3rd from right) Mary Harriette Vinson (front row, 3rd from left) Russell Wallace (middle row, 2nd from right) Geneva Wofford Norman Wofford Rena Wofford Thelma Womack  (Sam Feltner Photo Collection, photo UB km-121) standing: Sidney Hargis, Charlie Miller, Edison Fentress, Henry Williams, Burley Bibb, John Robertson, Willie Hargis, Willie Fentress seated: Wayne Clark ("alto"), Elmer Holland, Charles Hargis, Joe Williams, Carlon Clark, Ed Pugh, Lonnie Hargis, Jessie Ezell A print of this photo was donated to the Archives by Donna Reynolds One of our favorite record groups at the Archives are the Circuit Court case files. These are the original papers that were generated for every case that arose in Circuit Court, above and beyond what was written in the large, bound Minute Books. Examples include summons, arrest warrants, indictments, testimony, contested wills, original deeds and divorce petitions. For Stewart County, these case files are about 95% complete all the way back to 1810. The Archives holds the case files from 1810-1999, with the recent files still in the courthouse.
The volunteers at the Archives have been cleaning, organizing, indexing and digitizing these case files for over 15 years now. They have never been microfilmed and have only been accessible at the Archives. We are pleased to announce that the case files which have been digitized are now accessible on the Archives' Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OqszJ7tohLl4GX9dPvbmKysz0IxG9rTg?usp=sharing There are about 5,600 case files now available, dating from 1810 until the 1890s, where the digitization project is now underway. Each case file is a PDF document, freely downloadable. The PDF file name typically includes the names of the plaintiffs and defendants in the case, as well as the year in which the case concluded in court. Once you've clicked on the link above, you can search for surnames of interest by using Google Drive's search box at the top center of the window. A partial listing of the case files (1810-1949) is available in a separate PDF on our Records page. A copy of the 1948 Bonanza yearbook from Dover High School recently came to the Archives from the Public Library. This was the third year that the school produced a yearbook.
You can view the pages from the yearbook on our Collections page. If you have the 1947, 1949 or 1950 yearbook, we'd love for you to bring it by the Archives for us to copy for our collection. We are truly thankful when people entrust their family documents and photographs, or copies of them, to the Archives for preservation and sharing with researchers. Here are some of the recent items we have received. Flavius P., Paul and Melinda Clark donated one of Melinda's prints of the Saline Milling Co. at Bumpus Mills. A mill stood on the site for 150 years under various owners from the 1810s to the 1960s. Becky Weaks Brandvik donated beautiful framed portraits of W. T. Thomas and Martha (Gray) Thomas of Cumberland City. She also donated family histories on the Bayer and Gray families, as well as photographs from the Weaks and Ross families. John Walsh donated two early-1900s photographs that he 'rescued' from an online auction so that they could return to Stewart County. One depicts the John Boswell house near Fort Henry, and the other depicts the John W. Wofford home halfway between Dover and Fort Henry. Mary Ann Dill Jordan let us make copies of her personal family research notes from the Bartee, Tishel, Geurin and Dill families. Also included was a biography of Newman Brandon Jr., and a copy of "Potpourri" by Anna Mary Tishel Brandon, and Mary Ann's personal family scrapbook of Tishel, Dill, Vinson and Jordan family history. This photo from the Sam Feltner Photo Collection, catalogued as AG 9-23, has been identified as the 1913 Senior Class of Glendale Institute at Bumpus Mills. Note that the girls are holding diplomas. The boys (left to right) are Gray Acree, Willie Fentress and Newman Brandon Jr. The girls (left to right) are Margaret Cornelia Burke, Blanche Dashiell McCoy and Mary Connia Walker. The graduation program comes from "In Memory of Newman Brandon Jr." by Anna Mary Tishel Brandon, recently loaned to the Archives for scanning by Mary Ann Dill Jordan. The program was the key to identifying everyone in the photo. The Sam Feltner Photo Collection has been online since 2010 on the Stewart County Genealogy website at TNGenWeb. Since that time and thanks to crowd-sourcing, hundreds of people in the collection have been identified. https://www.tngenweb.org/stewart/fpa/feltnermain.htm
We never know what we are going to find at the Archives. Tucked inside a 1920s Settlements and Bonds book we found this 1881 marriage license for R. M. Scott and Eliza Mitchell. Why is that unusual? Well, this one brings the county's collection of surviving marriage licenses from 1804-1950 to a grand total of 3. Just three licenses survive for almost 150 years of county history. The marriage license was a piece of paper written by the County Court Clerk and handed to the groom. Typically, the person who performed the wedding wrote the marriage date on the back of license, signed it, and returned it to the County Court Clerk for recording in a bound marriage book. Afterwards, the clerk filed the license in his office. But almost no marriage licenses survive in Stewart County until 1950, and we don't know why. But there's another remarkable fact about this newly-discovered 1881 marriage license. The bound marriage book that covered the years 1876-1881 was destroyed at some point, and the marriages for 1876-1881 are lost - nothing is known about the couples who married during those 5 years. This 1881 marriage occurred during that lost period, so the information on this marriage license reveals information that had been thought to be lost forever. The back of this license has much more than the wedding date and celebrant's name, though. It also gives the ages of the bride and groom, their place of residence (Lyon County, KY) and the names of the witnesses.
The Tennessee General Assembly passed a law in 1881 requiring counties to record births and deaths. The law was repealed in early 1883, apparently due to the lack of compliance and enforcement.
Stewart County has both the Birth Records and Death Records volumes surviving for this period, though just a few pages were used in each volume due to the short lifespan of the state law. The Birth Records pages were microfilmed in the late 1960s. The information from those pages has been on the Stewart County TNGenWeb site for 11 years. Tucked inside the Birth Records book were a few loose birth certificates and five loose death certificates, also from the 1881-1883 period, which have also been on the TNGenWeb site for over a decade. We realized only recently that the Death Records book not only had never been microfilmed, but that its contents had *not* been transcribed. The 74 death records contained in the book have been seen by very few researchers until now. These death records contain great information for researchers, including parents' names and place of residence. This is a thrilling find that has been hiding in plain sight here at the Archives for a long time. See the attached images for a full transcription of the recorded death information. A transcription of all the death information, plus images from the original book, are available on the Archives' Google Drive, as a PDF file, at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_7r_THHdOKo5_me9XmdDQEiG0CgwZrB4/view?usp=drive_link The names, ages and dates of death mentioned are: Acree, Grien Ann 40 Mar 9, 1882 Allen, Grace 1 Sep 8, 1881 Anderson, Cliff 8 Jul 9, 1881 Anderson, Evan 3 Oct 7, 1882 Andrews, Robert Allen 1 May 11, 1882 Bachelor, John Henry Erwin 2 Oct 2, 1881 Barnes, Lydia 63 Aug 11, 1881 Black, George Franklin 11 mos. Aug 11, 1881 Blaine, Sylvia Lorana 17 Mar 1, 1882 Bond, Rosella 5 Jul 20, 1881 Bradford, Ambrose B. 5 Aug 6, 1881 Bradshaw, James Emmerson 26 Dec 31, 1881 Brown, Curtis Scott 3 Aug 27, 1881 Brown, Willie Gertrude 10 mos. Mar 8, 1882 Burk, William 41 Burke, James Walter 9 Sep 18, 1881 Carter, Margaret 28 Aug 27, 1882 Cherry, Charles Cullen Oct 12, 1881 Chester, Fannie 19 Apr 18, 1881 Choat, Joseph Michael 6 mos. Sep 10, 1881 Crane, Isaac Crow 2 Sep 12, 1881 Dennis, ---- 0 Sep 5, 1881 Dilday, Henry 27 Jul 14, 1881 Doolin, Nicholas 75 Jun 30, 1881 Dortch, Columbus 41 Apr 11, 1881 Doyle, John 40 Jun 15, 1882 Duncan, Louella 10 Nov 2, 1881 Ferguson, Alosious 2 Aug 2, 1881 Fielder, Joseph A. B. 20 Sep 20, 1881 Futrell, William Dawsey 20 May 22, 1881 Giffin, J. W. 42 Apr 5, 1881 Givins, James 23 Jun 15, 1882 Green, Elizabeth Ann 29 Sep 19, 1881 Griffin, Nelson 81 May 3, 1881 Hargis, Mary Ann Martha 68 Jul 24, 1881 Harris, Chattee Bratton 8 Sep 18, 1881 Hodges, George Warner 37 Sep 18, 1882 Hues, John 22 Sep 23, 1882 Johnson, William Rufus 30 Apr 15, 1882 Kirksey, Alice Edna 1 Oct 21, 1881 Lee, ---- 0 Dec 18, 1881 Lee, Addie Lenora 16 Dec 21, 1881 Lee, Mary Catherine 30 Feb 27, 1883 Marberry 5 hrs. Aug 6, 1882 May, Phillip S. 18 Aug 8, 1881 McCarty, John Lee 8 Aug 19, 1882 McElroy, Anna 3 Sep 26, 1881 McKinney, Milley Jun 30, 1881 Milam, Lorance 4 Aug 16, 1881 Morris, William Gray 70 Nov 7, 1881 Nolan, Ellan 40 Mar 7, 1882 Pace, ---- 0 Dec 2, 1881 Parker, William N. 30 Feb 12, 1882 Price, Martha Parelee 24 Jul 25, 1881 Richardson, John 38 Jan 23, 1882 Riggins, Isabel 35 May 17, 1882 Ross, James 68 May 26, 1881 Ross, Mary H. 20 Feb 15, 1882 Ruggles, C. 21 Jun 30, 1881 Ruggles, Christian Jun 30, 1881 Sikes, C. C. 63 Aug 23, 1881 Stacker, Mary E. 12 Jun 4, 1882 Stubblefield, Willie 6 mos. May 22, 1881 Stumbelfield, Willie 1 May 22, 1881 Taylor, Albert Lee 5 days Dec 25, 1882 Taylor, Mary Green 24 Dec 21, 1882 Taylor, Walter Lee 28 Nov 12, 1882 Thompson, William 40 May 1, 1881 Tidwell, Anna Bell 10 mos. Dec 12, 1881 Townzen, Henry Coleman 83 Jan 28, 1882 Venable, Carneygan E. 32 Sep 2, 1881 Wallace, ---- 1 day Jul 2, 1881 Wallace, Lydia 25 Aug 25, 1882 Wallace, Mary Catharine 2 Jul 21, 1881 Walter, Mary Woods Jan 8, 1882 Welker, Hettie 3 Sep 27, 1881 Will, Henry 30 Jul 31, 1881 Williams 1 day Dec 26, 1881 Woods, Clifton 19 Nov 3, 1881 |
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