Tax records may not seem very exciting but that's only because they aren't. Seeing how many acres, cows, or horses your ancestor held is mildly interesting at best, and it's not exactly revelatory as to their character or life experiences. It pales in comparison to, say, a census record that tells us a woman gave birth to 16 children though only 4 survived, or informs us that someone was, perhaps, a touch insane. It doesn't hold a candle to a newspaper account of a father and son killing each other in a duel or a Quaker meeting record reporting that a member was ousted for fornication.
Tax records may not be the star of the show, but they can tell us more than we may realize if we know a bit more about them. Designations in tax records can give us pertinent information about our research subjects if we take the time to understand what the laws of the land were at the time.
Take Chester County, Pennsylvania, for example. As in many other places, there were two main taxes in the county at the time: a land tax and a head tax. Records of tax charged to landholders shows us some of what they owned—in this case, the acreage they held in a given township and the horses, cattle, and sheep they had in their possession.
Chester County tax record, 1772, New Garden township. Isaac Richards must have been so smug about his 300 acres and large cadre of domesticated animals. FamilySearch.
As we can see in the record above, the landholder tax was assessed for men who held real and personal property in New Garden township in Chester County, Pennsylvania for the year 1772. The men are listed more or less in alphabetical order, meaning we cannot assume in this case that the proximity of names equated to physical proximity.
An interesting component of this tax record can be found on the facing page, however: a list of "inmates" and "freemen."
Finding your research subject in one of these two lists can give us some helpful clues as to who they were. Men listed as "freemen" or "inmates" held no land, but they were still subject to the head tax. The men who appeared on this list were at least 21 years of age and could not have been indentured or bound out—generally for a six-month period—prior to the time of taxation. Further, the distinction between the two groups is that the "freemen" were single, and the "inmates" were married. Vaguely insulting, but this is the 1700s we're talking about, so this doesn't rank too high on the list of what we might consider egregious by today's standards.
So how can we use this information? One tax record doesn't give us a whole lot of information, but collecting tax records for our subjects across multiple years can often provide helpful clues.
If your subject appears in a tax record for a given year, search for him in prior years until he can no longer be found. If his name is missing in a prior year, and he can't be found in another nearby township, it might be a clue that he had just come of taxable age by the time of the first record, providing you with a clue as to his possible date of birth. Or it could mean that he had served a period of indenture that had only recently ended. It could, of course, mean that he had only just arrived in the county, the state, or the country. Men listed as "freemen" were as likely to have been grown sons of landholders as they were to be skilled laborers and/or newly arrived immigrants.
A change from freeman to inmate from one year to the next is a pretty strong indication that the person had married. And a man who then becomes a landholder or who is no longer a landholder tells us that there's a deed, or land grant, or probate document we may be able to find to learn more about how and to or from whom the land was bought or sold.
Tax records may be far from fascinating, but they are, as the old adage suggests, the only other thing as certain as death. And a researcher who learns about the context of records is certain to learn more from the records our ancestors left behind.
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