The Tennessee Frontier. Genealogy Records are Available Online to Researchers
Pictured is Fort Loudon in Tennessee, courtesy of pinterest.com
Tennessee was the home of friendly Cherokee Indians. As early as 1757, before the great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.
Although Fort Loudon fell during the war, and Waddell's fort was abandoned, early colonists returned several years later to build the first cabins on the Holston River.
These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did not survive, but in 1768, the same settlers or others of their kind—discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments—once more made homes on the Holston. A few families joined them from near the present Raleigh, North Carolina, and the first cabin on the Watauga River was erected by William Bean (or Been), hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose the site of his dwelling as the place of the old hunting camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have neighbors.
Davidson County, Tennessee, has some of the earliest surviving records for Tennessee genealogists.
Davidson County
Images of Wills, Estates, Deeds 1784-1792; 1792-1804
Images of Wills 1805-1809; 1809-1816
Marriages 1789-1837; 1848-1849; 1838-1847; 1850-1863