You can order death records for the period 1908-1949 from the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Those for the time period of 1908-1912 are available on-line. They also have a partial index of records from 1914-1925.

These records can be invaluable in your search. It is advisable to obtain a person’s death record even if you think you know everything about the person. Info included on these records includes name of the deceased, birth and death place and date, marital status making it possible to determine if a spouse died before or after the deceased, name and birthplace of parents, place of burial, name of the undertaker or funeral home where you may find more records, and in some cases, the cause of death. To obtain the cause you may have to state your relationship to the person and that the request is for genealogical research.

For death records beginning in 1950 to the present, you will need to contact the Tennessee Vital Records Office.

An Index to Death Records 1980-1912 at the Tennessee State Library and Archives can be found here.

You can search for death, divorce and marriage records on any county in the state on the Shelby County Register of Deeds web site.

Death records in the USGenWeb Archives.

In addition the following published resources are available. Check library catalogs for availability and interlibrary loan.

• • Lynch, Louise Gillespie, Death records of Bedford County, Tennessee , 1984.
  • Marsh, Helen Crawford, Hoover funeral and burial records of Bedford County, Tennessee, c 1989. This book may also be purchased from Sistler and Associates.
  • Martha Smotherman Mendez transcribed and provides 1924-1936 death records from the”Death Records” found in the ledger in the Bedford Archives.

 

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Death Notices from the Nashville Christian Advocate prepared by Lucy Bryant Dunaway Zeier.