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The institution of apprenticeship was a common means of providing for the maintenance and future self-reliance of orphaned children as well as for any children whose parents had abandoned them or otherwise refused to support them. Apprenticeship records ( which ordinarily take the form of bonds and indentures) are ordinarily buried among volumes of original county court minute books. They are nonetheless valuable to genealogists because they establish the existence of young people who might otherwise go undetected in the more conventional genealogical sources.

West Tennessee's Forgotten Children: Apprentices, 1821-1889 marks the third and concluding volume in Dr. Alan N. Miller's series of extractions of Tennessee apprenticeship records. Just as he did for the twenty-nine counties of East Tennessee and thirty-five counties of Middle Tennessee, Dr.Miller has sifted through the apprenticeship records of West Tennessee and brought them within the reach of the genealogy researcher. This third volume of Tennessee's "forgotten children" contains over 4,000 apprenticeship records scattered among the minutes of the county courts for West Tennessee. These records span the period from 1821-1889 and list in tabular form the apprenticeships created in the following 19 Tennessee counties: Benton, Carroll, Crockett, Decatur, Dyer, Fayette, Gibson, Hardeman, Hardin, Haywood, Henry, Lake, Lauderdale, Madison, McNairy, Obion, Shelby, Tipton, and Weakley.

Dr. Miller, who began this three-volume project in 2000, extracted this volume from county court minutes on microfilm obtained from the Tennessee State Archives, the Dallas Public Library, and the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. He has arranged the records by county and thereunder chronologically. For each record we are given the name of the apprentice, a date (either the date of the original bond or indenture, or a subsequent date), the age at apprenticeship, the name of the master, and miscellaneous information ranging from the name of the mother or a sibling, race, cause of apprenticeship (e.g., orphan), his/her trade, etc.

See also the other volumes in this series:

East Tennessee's Forgotten Children: Apprentices from 1778 to 1911
Middle Tennessee's Forgotten Children: Apprentices from 1784 to 1902