North Carolina had a law on the books that required all illegitimate children to be bound out. I've even seen some as young as 6 months being bound out. I do want to point out that in some case, the children were not bound out to strangers, but often they were bound out to family members or neighbors. I'm working right now on the Spellman family from Craven county. In that case, she had 6 children, as far as I can tell illegitimately, and they were all bound out to her employer actually, so the children were really not taken away from her. Of course that isn't always the case though and there are quite a few bound out to strangers. One interesting thing you can gather from these apprenticeships is the law in NC also required up until around 1850ish, that the apprenticeship master MUST teach their wards to read and write. If later census where it asks if they can read or write, if it's checked off that they cannot and you know they were bound as apprentices before 1850, then their apprenticeship master did not follow the law. I haven't posted anything to my blog for a couple of weeks, but there is a post about apprenticeship records in NC and an overview of their laws along with what you can get from.