Hi! Thank you for taking an interest in East Tennessee genealogy. My name is Kelly, and I’m so glad you’ve found this site. By day, I am a research and data scientist, and by night, I am a hobbyist genealogist, which is not that tremendously different than my day job. However, the ways I entered into these two pursuits are drastically different – I am pursuing a Ph.D. for my daytime career, but I started learning about genealogy to quiet the incessant rumblings from my mother concerning our at-the-time unproven relation to Valentine Sevier, the father of famous American Revolutionary, John Sevier.
Growing up in rural Appalachian East Tennessee, I was surrounded by history – the area is steeped in it. However, it is somewhat more rare for families here to know their familial history, particularly past a couple of generations. It’s interesting. If you’ve grown up in Northeast Tennessee and your family has been in the area long enough, at least a line or two of your family likely pre-dates the American Revolution. My mother was convinced this was the case for our family’s relation to Valentine Sevier. She had a scrap of paper from a great aunt, with first names scratched on it, supposedly tracing our Sevier line. Either out of spite or interest, or a little of both, I set out to prove or disprove this once and for all.
This was quite an interesting first foray into genealogy. You see, our Sevier line runs smack through a whole bunch of Smiths, and we all know how much work it can be to untangle a big jumble of Smiths. Finally, though, my mother and I did sort everything out, obtaining pretty sound documentation for all generational links. One thing we knew was that we wanted our research to be publicly available and shared. As a trained research scientist, I believe research should be widely available and read – I feel the same concerning genealogical research. One way we chose to go about this was to send in this Sevier line research to Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and I continue to do this for additional lines of my family history as I research them. The second way in which I am working to make my genealogical research easily accessible is this website. If you have roots in Northeast Tennessee, we’re probably cousins. I hope in some way, my search to find my family helps you find yours, too.
If the information you seek doesn’t appear on this site, my answer to your question will probably be “I don’t know”. I try to keep this site as up-to-date as possible. If you have additions or corrections, I’d love to make them – please contact me!