Marion County, Kentucky · Founded on the Rolling Fork
The city thatkept its own record.
We gather the photographs, deeds, obituaries, church rolls, and spoken memory of Bradfordsville — and we help the families who came from here find their way back to the people who stayed.
Who We Are
A small society with a long memory
The Bradfordsville Historical Society is a volunteer group of neighbors, descendants, and researchers working to keep Marion County's southern end from becoming a blank spot on the map. We meet, we index, we scan, and we answer letters from people who left generations ago.
1860s
Village settled along the Rolling Fork
4,100+
Catalogued photographs, deeds, and clippings
280
Surnames indexed in our family files
Year-round
Volunteer research hours, free to the public
Bradfordsville Blacksmith ledger 1938
From the Archive
Plates from the collection
Genealogy Help
Three steps to finding your people
Research help is free. We ask only that findings come back to the archive so the next descendant has an easier road.
Send us the names
Write with everything you have — a surname, a rough date, a story your grandmother told. Nothing is too thin a thread to start on.
We search the files
Volunteers check our surname folders, cemetery transcriptions, church rolls, obituary clippings, and Marion County deed abstracts.
Come see it yourself
When you visit, we pull the originals, walk you through the burial grounds, and connect you with neighbors who remember the family.
On the Calendar
Come stand in the room where it happened
“My people left this county in 1922 and I grew up a thousand miles away. The society found my great-grandfather’s burial in an afternoon, and then walked me out to the stone.”
A descendant, writing from Indiana
Take Part
The record survives because people keep it
Nothing in this archive arrived on its own. Each box came from a kitchen table, an attic, or a hand-written list someone thought to save.
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Become a member
Annual membership keeps the lights on at meetings and funds acid-free storage for fragile originals.
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Lend us your photographs
We scan family albums, letters, and funeral cards at no cost and hand the originals straight back to you.
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Volunteer an afternoon
Indexing, cemetery mapping, transcription, and greeting visitors — every hour widens the record.