Nathan Bedford Forrest was born on July 13, 1821 to a poor settler family in a secluded frontier cabin near Chapel Hill hamlet, then part of Bedford County, Tennessee, but now encompassed in Marshall County. Forrest was the first son of Mariam (Beck) and William Forrest. His father William was of English descent, and most of his biographers state that his mother Mariam was of Scotch-Irish descent, but the Memphis Genealogical Society says that she was of English descent. He and his twin sister, Fanny, were the two eldest of blacksmith William Forrest's 12 children with wife Miriam Beck. Forrest's great-grandfather, Shadrach Forrest, possibly of English birth, moved from Virginia to North Carolina, between 1730 and 1740, and there his son and grandson were born; they moved to Tennessee in 1806. Forrest's family lived in a log house (now preserved as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home) from 1830 to 1833. John Allan Wyeth, who served in an Alabama regiment under Forrest, described it as a one-room building with a loft and no windows. William Forrest worked as a blacksmith in Tennessee until 1834, when he moved to Mississippi. William died in 1837 and Forrest became the primary caretaker of the family aged 16.