There's something I still don't understand about #FindAGrave.
My granny's grandad was buried at Witton Cemetery Birmingham in 1905. I confirmed ages ago with the Birmingham cemetery office he is buried in an unmarked grave in a communal plot.
I found a few minutes ago that he's got a memorial on Find a Grave created by "! WooWoo" who seems to have created 14,618,067 memorials and manages 15,050,447 memorials on Find a Grave.
#GenChat Interesting to see that many people on both M and the X-T site read "tax records" and equated that with "personal income taxes" without thinking of all the other records of taxes that may be out there. Use the FamilySearch Wiki, the RootsWeb Wiki, and other guides to find records you may have missed!
A5 ... in the UK it might be via irregularities/scandal made public through old newspapers.
Esp as debts due to Inland Revenue supposedly take preference over others this topic often enough crops up in bankruptcies and business failures/maladministration.
A4 #genchat@genchat Last night, we'd pretty much concluded that federal-level returns would not be available. But perhaps they may be as Jan pointed out, " Once tax records become archival, the archive's rules apply just as they would with any other historical records."
Chris - Profession. Residence. How much they made. Work history. What jobs they had. Basically, it's kind of like a census but you have to pay 'em.
Jenny - Also, in tax records from the Russian Empire and Congress Poland, there will most likely be a patronymic listed for the tax payer’s father, which is valuable information. Occasionally, tax records from that area also listed the household composition of the tax payer.
Elizabeth - Land owned, improvements made (cabin, barn, etc), no land owned, livestock owned, age (look for first listing as Freeman) & then approx marriage date (now not a Freeman but had some livestock and maybe land)...
Cristina - If it's income taxes we can learn their occupation, whether they were an employee or ran their own business, and how much they made. And if they cheated on their taxes! Just kidding on that last one!
A3 ... example rateable property records ... the owner of a property ... which can be problematical. Esp inaccuracies.
My great grandfather owned property ... Two houses which he bequeathed to his daughters. The Brum property record on ancestry gives his name for the one house and a slightly different name for the other house which has led me along a twisted inconclusive bunny trail before now.
This was a William Samuel Powell masquerading as Benjamin ... I was hoping this William fellah might have been an uncle ... a brother of Ben's father ... as I couldn't get back before Ben's father.
No such luck, obviously. All pre DNA.
Of course, Ben might not have wanted the rating office to know he owned both places, maybe??
Well last night Jan (as usual) gave us a ton of helpful Info :
Modern property tax records can tell you when a house might have been built or remodeled, and sometimes even give you a footprint of the building and its rooms.
If you find records that someone owned property over a certain value, if you're thinking about when they came of age, or if they have income over a certain value. It depends on whether you are "boots on the ground" or looking online.
I highly recommend Judy G. Russell's webinars on the law and how it applies to our research, especially "How Old Did He Have to Be?" Knowing the law tells you when someone is likely to be on a tax list.
Knowing the law is so helpful for all the records we use for #genealogy. I think it was Michael Hait who said in a webinar "Clerks don't keep records for fun."
Most records we use were kept because some law mandated them, or when people were keeping track of money.
Knowing each locality's laws are so important! You can search Judy G. Russell's blog, The Legal Genealogist, to get ideas for finding the laws for individual states, territories, or federal laws.
While I think of it ... Planning applications are public documents ... not strictly on topic ... but nowadays recent ones are searchable online in some areas.
@RobertJackson58585858@genchat You're making me think: if an ancestor owned a business, perhaps the taxes that business paid may be more public as well. #genchat