EARLIEST RECORDED MARRIAGES IN HENDERSON COUNTY

Jonathan Kennon Thompson Smith

Although Goodspeed's history of Henderson County states that the records of the county court clerk were destroyed for the period before 1840 it seems that the minutes of the court were intended because the same source lists several marriages (page 798) which surely would have come from one source, the marriage records recorded in the county court clerk's office; the state required marriage records to be written in bound volumes only from the mid-1830s so that the old marriages quoted by Goodspeed would have been from bonds later recorded in an early book or from the loose bonds themselves (which seems unlikely).

H. H. HOPKINS and SOPHIA GREER, January 8, 1822
JOHN A. NULL and HESTER HUMPHREYS, December 22,1822
CALVIN GILLUM and SUSAN REEVES, 1828
B. H.TATE and POLLY CHAMBERS, July 26, 1825
JAMES PHILLIPS and MARTHA RUTLEDGE, 1826
ROBERT CARTER and LYDIA MATHEWS, 1826
WILLIAM POTTS and ELIZABETH RODGERS, October 24, 1823
ROBERT RHODES and LUCY REDGES /possibly misread/, January 24, 1823
SILAS MATHEWS and ELIZABETH SNELL, January 24, 1824

This source and several others comment that the "minister officiating most frequently" was JOHN BARRETT/DARNETT, when in fact this was the Cumberland Presbyterian minister, JOHN BARNETT, prominent in the preaching at the old Bethlehem Campground on the Henderson—Madison counties line, a short distance north of today's U.S. Highway 412.

Other works by Jonathan K. T. Smith can be found at the Madison County Records Repository at TNGenWeb.