HOW TO FIND TAX LISTS

Some tax lists are available online. You may wish to try some of these sites and see what is available. Some are merely lists of what is available, and others are actually transcribed listings.

VIRGINIA. Virginia Tax Lists 1790/1800 County Tax Lists:

http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~ysbinns/vataxlists/index.htm

KENTUCKY. 1823 Lawrence County Kentucky Tax Lists:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~churn/taxlist.html

STATE ARCHIVES

Most tax lists are available in state archives. You may search these state archives online. Try searching for a state archive you are interested in and noting if they have tax records available.

THE FAMILY HISTORY LIBRARY

Many tax lists have been microfilmed. They may be available in large genealogy libraries such as the Family History Library. Go online to www.familysearch.org and see if you can locate a tax record for your area of research. Go to the Family History Library Catalog online, select locality search, and go to the state you are interested in. Now locate a county, and search for the category "Tax Records." They may be at a county, city, or a state-wide level.

PUBLISHED TAX RECORDS

Some tax records have been completed transcribed and analyzed. While it is beyond the scope of this lesson to cover all these other tax records, it should be noted that even prior to 1790 taxes were taken by various governmental agencies. In 1671, for example, the colony of New Sweden had already been part of the Province of New York since 1664. Few of its residents, however, took the trouble to pay the two beavers for a New York patent and the "quit rents" (taxes) was far less than it should have been. To correct this situation, in 1671 a census was taken of former New Sweden and a similar one was taken at Whorekill (Lewes, Delaware). The resulting censuses, each on a single piece of paper, were stored in the New York archives. They were largely unlooked at by genealogists until Dr. Peter Stebbins Craig abstracted those records in a book entitled 1671 Census of the Delaware. He spent fifteen years analyzing this census, identifying each of the households and giving family histories for each person known to be residing on the Delaware River at that time. This 108-page, hardback book (ISBN No. 1-887099-19-7) is available ($25 postpaid) from the author, 3406 Macomb St., N.W., Washington, DC 20016.

Check your own research goals and see if this record group might be helpful in your personal studies.

The next lesson will deal with approaches you can take to determine a more exact locality for an ancestor you know little about. As you go back in time, remember this lesson on tax records and how it might apply in these new localities.