Hello, I am fairly new to the field of historic preservation, and I am doing some family history research. There is a hot debate in my family of history junkies on whether or not our ancestors had $$$ or not. One of the earliest properties they owned was in mid-late 1700's in Tennessee, more specifically pre-Revolutionary War and more technically the Territory South of the River Ohio. What we have seen is some tax documents just before the turn of the century and war pension documents, we also know they had about 1,000 acres of farm and wooded land. Would there be any other documents from this era that would talk about their property and monetary worth that we could find earlier on these people and where would they be located for research?
You could do a deed search. Identify the property location, go to the county, start with the present deed book at the county clerk's office and work backwards. TN Archives also has some records on microfilm, so you would only have to go to Nashville. There'd be somebody at the archives who could help you, I'm sure. A county historical society could also likely give you some help. As a lot of folks do searches like this in the process of doing their geneology, it's a question that keepers of local records are used to answering..
However, this could become complicated. Mid 18th c. is awfully early for a Tennessee property. Before the Rev. War there would be, technically, no legitimate settlements west of the Smokies. North Carolina would claim the territory, but the British deferred to the Native Nations and barred settlers in 1763. After 1782, there would be a rush by Virginia land speculators ( look up the history of the State of Franklin) but North Carolina would insist on granting lands to its own land speculators ( or, maybe more accurately, the North Carolina elite that governed would grant lands to itself). I am pretty sure that, like Kentucky, there were a lot of "shingled" claims: because surveying wasn't done and records were not sorted, people filed claims that overlapped. You could have a number of shingled claims on the same property, some held by speculators in North Carolina who never came west, some by land speculators who arrived, filed claims and left, and finally just the occupancy of people who simply squatted on the empty land, built homes, started farming, and resisted being kicked off. In KY, it all had to be sorted out by the courts, taking years.