The Blogging from A to Z Challenge is to post everyday (except Sunday) in the month of April 2016 starting with the letter A and going all the way to Z. The theme I chose is Genealogy Tips. At the end I will give a related post from my blog Genealogy: Beyond the BMD.
T is for Taxes
A timely theme, since it is tax time here in North America.
I won't go into boring details of all the ways the governments dream up to take our tax dollars, you can read about them in the below mentioned post.
One interesting thing I found....
In the publication of the list of tax payers for Charleston, SC for 1860, there is a list at the back titled "Tax on Property paid by Persons of Indian Descent and Free Persons of Color" with list of names, value of property and amount of tax paid. Even some of them had slaves!
Something I found while researching my ancestors in Devon, is that by using the Devon Tithe Apportionment Books and the accompanying map with corresponding numbers I could map all the land my ancestors owned or rented in Devon. Also using the descriptions of land my 4x great grandfather Clement King left to his children in his will I could map that out.
Related Post: The Taxman Cometh
Devon Genealogy Resources
My friend is a huge proponent of property taxes and personal property taxes for tracing ancestors. For a long time I hated them and resisted, but she's right. In Virginia tax records, you can just about pinpoint a birth date for an ancestor based on when he entered the records, and you can tell when someone died when the wife is suddenly paying taxes.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to escape the taxman - tax records are a good place for finding ancestors.
ReplyDelete