These tax records were extracted from the microfilmed 1820-1860 Trigg County Tax Lists. Tax books for some years are missing, others are incomplete and still others are partially unreadable due to water damage etc. With all that, however, these records represent a remarkable opportunity to watch families enter the area, establish themselves, prosper (or fail), propagate their names, then die out or move away.
One of the problems with transcribing this material for incorporation in a data base is that the information required by the state changed almost every year. For example, some counties (Trigg, for instance) recorded the militia company the taxpayer belonged to in some of the early years. Others, such as Caldwell, did not. I set up my data base to capture as much of the essential information as possible, which means that I ended up with a sort of "lowest common denominator" data base where there are a lot of empty fields. I would urge you to use my material as a guide to what can be found in these tax lists rather than as source material. In all cases you should personally confirm my transcription by referring to the microfilm yourself.
I think I should explain something about these tax records. Before the 1827 tax year, there were no Olivers or Winns listed in the county. Suddenly, there were many listed. They had not moved, but the Caldwell-Trigg county line had, for the 4th time since 1820. This time, the line moved north to include the Hurricane Creek watershed where many of the Caldwell County Olivers and Winns lived. If you look at a present day map, you'll see a little zig in the line beginning at the Blackhawk and running west to the Tennessee River. That was, so far as I can tell, the result of the 1827 change. Caldwell County Tax records mesh exactly with those of Trigg in that Olivers lost from the Caldwell tax lists appear on the Trigg tax lists.
This extracted data contains 18 fields of data for each year. Depending on the county and the year, some fields are empty. These are indicated by a hyphen. Some years, taxpayers was asked the number of children in an age catagory. I have included those numbers in the column under "My Comments". Again, please confirm before using.