Clay County, Tennessee Court Records

Court Records of Clay County have been microfilmed and may be ordered from the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Court Records are also available at the Clay County Court House as follows.

Administrator	1871-present	Birth	1908-1912
Chancery Court	1871-present	Circuit Court	1871-present
County Court	1871-present	Death	1908-1912
Deed	1871-present	Estate	1871-present
Guardian	1871-present	Marriage	1871-present
Probate	1871-present	Tax	1884-5, 1897-present
Trust Deed	1874-present	Will	1871-present

A very good article explaining about Courts Where Tennessee Court Cases Were Tried can be found on the Tennessee State Library and Archives site.

Clay County was not formed until December 1870. Therefore, for records before that date you will need to check the court records section of Clay County's parent county Jackson County . Although many of Jackson County's records were destroyed by fire, the records of the Chancery, Circuit, and County Court survived as they were in another location. Also check in Overton County Records, another parent county. You may even need to look in the court records of Monroe and Cumberland County, Kentucky depending on the time period and the confusion over the state boundary line.

Many may not realize that portions of northern Tennessee, including what is now Clay County, were once in Kentucky. For further information, click here to see an excellent report on Walker's Line. This may affect where you look for Clay County ancestral information. Some researchers have reported finding the same Land Grants in both Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of the Land Grants reported in The Kentucky Land Grants (A Systematic Index to All of the Land Grants Recorded in the State Land Office at Frankfort, Kentucky 1782-1924) by Willard Rouse Jillison are in fact in what is now Clay County, Tennessee. Some Tennessee counties affected are Clay, Claiborne, Fentress, Jackson, Macon, Montgomery, Robertson, Smith, and Stewart.

To learn about other issues affecting law in the early days, click here.