Joyce's Search Tip - January 2008 Do You Know that you can search just the Tax Records on the site by using the Tax button in the Partitioned search engine at the bottom of the Current What's New Page?

In 1833, our populace was living on a small cleared plot in a vast forested expanse. Their home was a log cabin or shanty with very few comforts. Heat and cooking were done on the open hearth as wood burning stoves did not come into use until the 1840s in some areas and much later in others. The family cow provided some milk and maybe some cheese. The oxen were the beasts of burden and the horses, and there were not a lot of  them doubled as beasts of burden and transportation. The main mode of transportation was by foot. Roads were mud paths. The family often also had chickens and pigs for meat and eggs. There was no luxury. It was what we would call subsistence living. 

By presenting tax records in this format over a period of time, we will be able to see the changes that occur and measure the development of the township for a particular period as well as the progress of an individual family. We can also get a glimpse at the relative prosperity, or lack thereof, of individual families.  At this point much of the township's acreage was still held by the speculators or large landholders, such as the Bingham Estate, and had not been brought into the tax records. By 1833 Union Township had been removed from Sullivan, but present day Ward was still part of it. The highest property valuations in the township were James Gray Sr., and Jr. of Gray Valley, Elijah and Nathaniel Welch of the Mainesburg/State Road area, and William Young who owned the saw mill, apparently purchased from Levi Rexford who had removed. 

Tax records are an excellent source of information in that the handwriting is generally much clearer than what we find on census records. These were copied back at the courthouse by people whose profession was writing or scribing, as they called it then. Also when individuals in the area had similar names, the presentation of them on the Tax Records was much more precise than on the census, so that there is no confusion year to year about the particular person being listed. I have examples of names that have been consistently transcribed erroneously from census records show up with perfect clarity on the tax records. They give us no information about the family. The booklets used for recording the tax information in the field as well as in the court house office were just the standard lined paper tablet book such as the school children used. It is not a whole lot different than similar booklets we use today. Some had a stiff cardboard cover and others just a paper cover with a decoration and advertising. 

When an individual has appeared in sequential years on the tax records, and then disappears, we can determine a more accurate date for the emigrations that occurred or potentially a death. Often there are notations about a property being transferred from one owner to another.  When a married woman appears on the tax list in place of her husband, we have a clue that he may have died. She will often be identified as widow. There are cases where married women were taxed even though their husbands were still living. This is the exception. Young men of working age were taxed as Freemen even if they owned no property. In fact, they'd be better off tax wise to own a cow as the tax was less on that than on single Freeman with no property status. The same was not true of young women of the same age. Children of people who could not afford to pay the school expense were listed because they had to be educated at county expense. In this era when the census listed the Head of Household name only, this is important information not easily found elsewhere. 

In many cases individuals were taxed in two townships or even two counties. If they were on the boundaries, which may well have been established even after they purchased their properties, their lands overlapped into two political divisions. They will usually show up on only one census, but on the tax rolls of both townships. It is a source of curiosity to me that if a pasture overlapped a boundary and the cow wandered back and forth across it, was she taxable in one township or both? See my article, You Gotta Know the Territory, for information about the political divisions. 

I have entered all of this information into my Sullivan-Rutland Genealogy Project database and have then extracted it back out to create the initial table. I have then added the itemized detail. Because of this the names are presented in full form as they are in my database, rather than as on the tax record. In the case of married woman, then, they are listed by their real name. The married alias under which they were taxed is then listed at the far right in the Miscellaneous column. If the name in my database is significantly different from the listing on the tax list, that too is included at the far right. 

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