The Tennessee State Library & Archives has unveiled an upgraded website – Patriot Paths: Mapping Tennessee’s American Revolution Pension Applications. Patriot Paths is an interactive digital resource developed by the Tennessee State Library & Archives (TSLA) to trace the journeys of Revolutionary War veterans who migrated to Tennessee after the war.
Using geographic information drawn from Revolutionary War pension applications submitted between 1818 and 1836, the site maps the migration patterns of more than 2,200 veterans who later settled in Tennessee. These records often contain detailed personal accounts from veterans describing their military service, places of residence, and the routes they traveled as they moved westward following the war.
By combining these historical records with modern geographic information systems (GIS) technology, Patriot Paths visually reconstructs the movement of these veterans from the communities they left behind in the original colonies and other early American settlements to the places where they eventually established new lives on Tennessee’s frontier…