NASHVILLE DAILY AMERICAN, 1876, A GENEALOGICAL SCRAPBOOK
Researched and Compiled by Jonathan Kennon Thompson Smith
Copyright, Jonathan K. T. Smith, 2003PREFATORY REMARKS
This publication contains an assortment of genealogically related abstracts from the Nashville DAILY AMERICAN, basically a newspaper formerly the Nashville UNION AND AMERICAN but reformed and renamed in 1875.
The newspapers of this period carried articles and/or news coverages of political issues and characters. The DAILY AMERICAN was fiercely partisan, an advocate of the Democratic Party and its leadership. There were also reports of the cotton and money markets, train and steamboat schedules, advertisements from many of the city's principal businesses and from other localities, legal announcements, religious news, a wide variety of literary selections and an immense amount of news stories and tidbits gleaned from many newspapers from throughout the nation.
Besides longer articles on current topics of local interest there were death and marriage notices and from time to time genuine obituaries, from which much information relevant to the interests of genealogists may be found. The newspaper published relatively few death notices as individuals had to submit such information to the newspaper office personally. It would be years before it became standard procedure for the newspaper to publish some notice of almost all deaths that occurred in the broad community and from elsewhere.
The present compiler has attempted to be accurate in gleaning data from the old newspapers. He is quite aware that some copies of actual articles from the newspapers often lack clarity, too dim and/or smudged and one has to read carefully, sometimes with a magnifying glass to "make out the information." Still, it is after the fashion of a scrapbook to include such articles as it gives the readers a firmer sense of what was involved and an effort has been made to get as good clarity as possible. Interested researchers may want to check the material on the microfilm for themselves which is always a good policy.
Jonathan K. T. Smith
Jackson, Tennessee
Early Winter 2003
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