A Visit to the Tennessee State Archives
I enjoy my involvement with the Timothy Demonbreun Heritage Society, which honors and preserves the memory of my French Canadian fur trapping ancestor, often called the first resident of Nashville, Tennessee. The society, made up mostly of us very distant cousins and our spouses, meets every few weeks on Zoom and only occasionally in person. Our previous in-person gathering was in September 2022 in St. Genevieve, Missouri.
Several of us met in Nashville last week to tour the new, state-of-the-art Tennessee State Archives. Our group included six from near Nashville, one from Oklahoma, three from Alabama, and me from two and a half hours away. We began the pre-arranged tour in the first floor display area of the Archives with Gordon T. Belt, Director of Public Services, serving as our guide.
Among the artifacts on display are these facsimiles of Tennessee’s 1796, 1834, and 1870 state constitutions. We learned that the originals are on display each year around June 1 to commemorate the date of Tennessee statehood.
Here is a close-up of our first handwritten constitution, which began with the words “We the People,” just as the U.S. Constitution does. A descriptive sign taught me that the 1796 constitution included a Declaration of Rights and that, according to one historian, Thomas Jefferson said that it was the “least imperfect and most republican of the state constitutions.” At a time when all states barred women from voting and some states only gave suffrage to white men, the Tennessee state constitution gave suffrage to men of all races if they owned land.
Next Mr. Belt led us into a large freight elevator to the third floor. Our former TDHS president told us about a past tour of the former Tennessee archives when several members got stuck on an elevator and the fire department had to come to their rescue.
I was not at all prepared for what we saw when we got upstairs! Though some other major libraries have this type of state-of-the-art, robotic book and document retrieval system, Tennessee is the only state archives that has one. The bins below hold books.
Here is a close-up so you can see inside.
These boxes hold papers.
These are books waiting to go back into their slots.
And this is the Dematic brand robot that picks up a bin of books and takes it back to its designated “home.” This 45-second animated video shows you how that happens.
In this photo, Mr. Belt stands beside Kaitlyne Bowling, Librarian/Archivist Assistant in the facility’s Archives Collection Services Section. She demonstrated the system for retrieving requested archives and returning them to their designated locations for us.
We deeply appreciated the opportunity to see the retrieval system in action, before heading downstairs to the reading room where researchers find shelves of books they can take directly off the shelves and also view materials they have requested from the storage area we had visited on the third floor. Mr. Belt surprised us by taking us to a table where he had placed retrieved materials related to Timothy Demonbreun.
A large section of the Tennessee State Archives reading room contains books about genealogy, which families are free to use to learn about their family heritage. Thank you for the family heritage you are building every day.
And even when I am old and gray, O God, do not forsake me,
Until I declare Your strength to this generation,
Your power to all who are to come.
Psalm 71:18