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Give Tax Lists a Try

For some states and time periods, tax lists can provide good genealogical evidence. People who owned land or livestock had to pay annual taxes on these sources of wealth. Counties kept records of these payments, and these lists can work as a yearly census of residents.

For my own family and my search for the roots of John Davis Riddle, I am looking at tax lists for clues. I know this ancestor was born in Pennsylvania in 1821, and he married Olive Dunbar in Summit County, Ohio in 1843. I have no information on his family or his whereabouts before 1843. Perhaps tax lists can help me.

Family Search (familysearch.org) has some Ohio tax lists online. I plan to search those records beginning with 1849 (when the Riddles left Ohio) and then work backwards to see if I can locate any likely Riddle families in Summit and the surrounding counties. I will also search for Davis families because my ancestor oddly signed the marriage register as a Davis instead of a Riddle when he married.

If I can locate my ancestor on one of these lists, I can then follow up with a search of other county records kept during the same time period. If he owned real property, his transactions will be in land records. If he had only valuable personal property, at least his name should appear on a list. In either case, I can look at marriages and probates for those same years for more information about him.

If he had little of anything, I will not find his name. I will be out of luck with tax lists as a clue for this genealogical problem.

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