The adoption records abstracted for this book fall into two categories: (1) Adoptions abstracted from state legislative records are labeled TPA (Tennessee Private Acts), followed by the volume number of the printed minutes for that year, then by the chapter/section numbers; (2) Adoption proceedings in local courts have been recovered from widely scattered, mostly-unindexed Minutes of the County Courts. The minutes of the County Courts of most Tennessee counties were searched until about 1900, but the search of Circuit Court Minutes was suspended with 1860. The entries in this work have been condensed in order to present all the genealogically significant data in a compact but readable form. Accounts of why a child was available for adoption are always included. These include stories of waifs found on a train, on the porch, in a haystack, or wandering the streets, as well as more mundane tales of abandonment and parental death, disability, or penury.