What Genealogists Can Learn from Tax Records

Tax records weren’t created for genealogists—but if you know how to read them, they can be surprisingly revealing. The key is knowing: 

• what kind of tax you’re looking at,
• the law that applies at that time and place
• and analyzing it (based on the above two), 

so you can understand what it means (and what it doesn’t).

 

The Three Main Types of Taxes

• Individual-Based Taxes

Often called poll tax, head tax, capitation, or tithables. These taxes are levied on individuals—usually adult males—and aren’t based on the value of their earnings or owned property. This is a flat fee tax for one person.

• Property-Based Taxes

These include taxes on land, livestock, luxury goods, or even features like hearths or windows. These can have lots of names since the tax on a luxury good or feature is often named for what it applies to. The broadest categories are real property taxes (or real estate taxes) and personal property taxes (property that is not "real," i.e. not land--this term usually applies to non-specialized taxes so a watch might be taxed as personal property or be taxed under luxury tax, a watch tax, jewelry tax, or some other categorization).

• Income or Production-Based Taxes

What most of us think of today as “taxes”—charged on earnings, profits, or production. This also includes religious tithes. These are a percentage of what you earn/produce. This article is mainly about civil taxes but the concept and uses can include tithes. Don't forget that in some times and places, every resident owned tithes to the church (i.e. they could not choose a different religion). As a genealogist, a religious tithe list can be just as useful as a tax list regardless if your ancestor could choose to belong to that church or not.

These three categories aren't always distinguished or defined when you're using tax records. There will be a definition of what taxes are owed but all the records might be mixed together as "tax records." You might also find every distinct tax in its own set of records. The purpose of including these descriptions here is to help you understand there are three main ways people can be taxed. You can't use the information for genealogy if you don't understand what you're seeing.

You can, of course, also have a combination of these types of taxes or variations*. Recognizing this is also vital. You can cause yourself problems if you misinterpret what you're seeing. You can also overlook another valuable source if you are careless in considering what kind of tax record you've used. When you use tax records, consider if you've seen each of these types for that time and place. Better yet, find out what types of taxes you should find in that time and place so you know whether they were all covered in the records you used or if you should look for more records.

*The variation that springs to mind is taxes due at someone's death. These should still fall under one of these three categorizations, flat-fee, based on ownership at time of death, or a percentage of earnings/production at time of death. The applications to a genealogist aren't different if it's a tax based on death instead of life, it's just the details that are different.

Genealogical Gold in Tax Records

Individual Taxes

This is both the potentially most useful and most easily overlooked. Because it is charged as a flat fee per person, it is either the same number listed for everyone (i.e. the amount) or a tick mark. Except it won't be for everyone.

It's easy to skip over what looks like the same information for most people on the list. But there will be a definition of who owes this tax, so a tick mark can tell you a lot.

Here are the most common things you can tell from an individual tax (there can always be exceptions):

• They reside in the place they are being taxed.
• The person is over a certain age or in a certain age range. For a death tax, you know they are dead as of that year. (In other words, there is some indication related to birth year or death year.)
• Through much of history it means they are male.
• They are not enslaved or considered the property of another person. There are times and places where women are the property of their husband or father.

Other things a head tax might indicate is:

• They are recognized as a certain race or ethnicity. When considering using tax records for genealogy, often we are told white males were most often the ones taxed but taxes may have also been levied on certain ethnicities or races in specific jurisdictions. This varies in lots of ways for different times and places so it's important to figure out and not just assume or apply what you know about another time and place.
• They may be a citizen, not just a resident.

Property Taxes

• This tax can appear in a list as how much of the taxable item is owned. The acreage or lots of land. The number of each type of livestock, the number of clocks, windows, etc.
• If you're unlucky, you instead find the amount of tax the person owes for that type of item. You can try and work backwards to convert this to a number (if you know watches were taxed at $0.30 and that's how much they owe, they owned one watch).
• At the least you can compare amounts to what others on the list owe. Was watch ownership common? Did your ancestor owe a much smaller or larger window tax?
• You may also be able to determine residence or location of real estate or a building. This is where you need to be careful if your person is wealthy or a business owner. The individual tax was tied to the person. Property taxes are tied to the property which can be in a different location from the owner. I have used tax records in Georgia where for some years, any land owned in Georgia was listed in the county of the owner's residence. Other years, the land was taxed in the county where it was located.
• If property tax reveals an additional location, that's another location to research!
• Real estate ("real property") might also reveal neighbors. This only appears in some records but you won't know until you look.

Property taxes charged on someone that doesn't owe a poll/head tax gives the added clue of indicating they don't fit the description of who owes a poll tax. Make sure you carefully consider what this is telling you. A good exercise is to run through the reasonable variations that could lead to this entry. These will vary depending on the criteria of who owes a head tax and also your research. Often we find tax records between census years. We might believe our person is the only one of that name living there in that decade but people do pass through. The government likes to get its taxes so this might be the only record or the first record you find this other person in. This might be when you discover you've been collecting records from two different men without realizing it.

Tax records are particularly amazing when you use them in conjunction with other clues from other sources. They may not tell you if someone was a certain age, race, gender, etc. but they might be another clue to strengthen what your other clues indicate. A run of tax lists (multiple years, especially consecutive ones) can be more informative than a census record when combined with other clues. Don't skip the tax records!

Income/Production Taxes

This is probably the least exciting type of tax for genealogists, at least if you have the option to use the other two, but if it exists, you still want to use it. It's possible you will find it gives the types of details of the other two combined. Instead, maybe you just know your ancestor was taxed more or less than most other people on the list. Once again, you won't know if this contains a minimum of details (they were alive, a resident, and owed a certain amount) or more details until you use the record.

Don't overlook other indications. Tithe lists might indicate religion. A tithe list that doesn't indicate religion at least indicates residence. Make sure you know which it is.

In some cases, this type of tax will tell you about the payer's occupation. Use the provided details to learn what you can.

Look out for pitfalls!

Someone not appearing on a tax list doesn't automatically mean they didn't meet a criteria. They may not have paid their taxes. Defaulters lists do exist but they aren't always connected to the list of tax payers they go with. If the defaulters list isn't available, the absence of someone from a list is only a clue and it might be a risky clue to use. You have to decide this based on what you know.

Tax lists can have mixed information (head and property taxes on one) or they can include related information. Make sure you understand what you're looking at.

Finally, don't assume an online search of tax records was comprehensive. Many of these were not manually indexed like census records. That means names (or pages of names) may have been missed or mangled. Tax records are valuable enough to genealogists to make it worthwhile to read through them if your person should be there (you should always read through them if you want to use the fact they are not on the list).

How to Get Started with Tax Records for Genealogy

This was a lot of "might" and "could." How do you glean clues or even facts from tax lists?

The quick answer to how you use all this potentially amazing detail is determine the tax law for that year and jurisdiction.

This can be difficult, requiring you trace back through books of tax records to find when the law was put into affect. You might be able to search a legal database but it is only accessible at a law library you don't have access to. 

Good news--those are the difficult situations. 

Unlike trying to find the usual genealogy details (birth date, death place, etc.), what the tax law was still exists and can be accessed. There will be exceptions but it's reasonable to assume the law can be found.

But it doesn't have to be complicated to do.

First, if you are using online tax records, see what information the website provides about them. Even if they don't give you the exact details, they may provide a link to the repository where the original (or microfilm) is held. You might learn more there.

If that doesn't work, see if you can find a guide (for genealogists) to using tax records in that jurisdiction (and possibly for that time-period). If you don't know where to find tax lists for your time and place,  start with this option. 

You may need to dive a little deeper than seeing if common genealogy sites like Ancestry have this (do try the FamilySearch wiki). Location-specific information on using tax records might be online via a genealogy society, repository (like an archives), or other source you don't normally use. You may need to find a paper copy. This might be a book or a periodical article (either of these might also be digitized).

If you can learn such a guide exists but it is a paper source, you can probably get a copy via inter-library loan, a photocopying service (which might be a scanning and emailing service), or you can pay someone to go to a repository and make a copy for you. 

Keep in mind, there are many variations of this. You might be working with an archive, a library, a genealogy society library, a genealogy society that visits local repositories for "lookups," or dealing with an individual researcher, which might be a genealogist, student, or other professional used to working in that location.

Finally, if you do need to use law books, there are multiple options.

• First, are the books digitized for free online such as through Google Books?
• Are they on a subscription site you can afford or use for free somewhere locally? 
• Similarly, can you use a law subscription yourself (at home or at a repository)? 

If you can't do this yourself, you have the same options for hiring an individual. It might be a genealogist, a student, or other professional--or the staff at a repository via the photocopying/scanning option.

One hint on this, you may not be able to access the law books/subscription because near you they are in a library only for lawyers. Somewhere else this may not be the case, meaning there is an affordable option for getting copies.

But here's what you should do first...

You see there are many options to learn how to use a specific tax record. The first thing you need to do is determine how valuable this is to your research. Then you can determine how many resources to put towards getting all the details you need.

Don't be afraid to mix and match! You may need to start by learning if tax records exist for the time and place you're researching and then what details they can hold (this is the general idea of what is recorded, but for the specific time-frame and place versus trying to find the exact law for one specific year).

You have limited research time and resources, is it worth spending it on tax records for this specific problem? You need to decide. The answer is different for different problems, just as tax records may not be a source you can even use for some problems.

If you come across a tax record by chance, how much time do you think is worth putting into learning more? Once again, this varies by problem and only you can decide for your own research. (If you find a record via a search by chance, at least take time to look at the collection description on that website. You might have all the details you need in less than 15-minutes. This is always worth it because you got knowledge and experience and it was only 15-minutes).

To be clear, the question is how much effort should you put in for a specific problem (not should you try using them at all--that answer is YES!). Some tax records are very easy to use and some don't even exist. Some problems can be easily solved if you could get appropriate tax records. Other problems will benefit little from the interesting details you'd learn.

How much time you'll need or is worth spending is a mix of what your specific problem can gain and how difficult using the specific tax records is. You often don't know how difficult they'll be to use until you start using them, so you need to start by understanding how they can help you and then consider that for a specific problem.

Tax records are a valuable source for genealogists. As more and more are available online, they are becoming increasingly easier to use. They can indicate some of our most sought after information such as an estimated year of birth or death, residence, occupation, and land ownership. They also flesh out the story of our ancestors helping us understand how they were similar or different from those living in the same time and place. If you've never tried using tax records, or thought they had little to reveal, give them a try.