Kathleen:

Thanks for the Reply and additional information.

I wanted to expressly call to your attention both the existence of early Tax Lists for Sumner County, TN, and some transcriptions of these Tax Lists now available online.

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The Tennessee State Library and Archives has a helpful page showing its holdings of extant tax lists. Amongst these, Sumner County is shown to have Tax Lists for these years: 1787-1844, 1856, 1861, 1862, 1865-1870, 1891.

See: http://www.tn.gov/tsla/history/county/taxlist.htm

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The Sumner County Archives also seems to have recently made a concerted effort to get some of these Tax Lists and other early Sumner County primary records transcribed:

http://archives.sumnertn.org/

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This RootsWeb page contains links to a number of transcriptions of Sumner, TN, Tax Lists:

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tnsumner/sumnlist.htm

This page also contains links to Sumner Tax list transcriptions:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~providence...

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I think your approach of noting not only the PRESENCE of ancestors, but also their ANSENCE from various Census enumerations is very sound. In think that a similar approach with respect to Tax Lists helps to establish rather precisely WHEN an ancestor first makes an appearance in a place, as well as when the ancestor seems to have departed or died. First appearances of sons often coincide with the child reaching majority and becoming obligated for a poll tax.

As shown in the Tennessee Library and Archives Reference, similar Tax Lists are available from a very early date from many Tennessee Counties.