Trying to Understand a Tax Record in Beaver County, Pennsylvania

The tax records I have found for my husband’s Gorrell family have been a godsend. These are yearly records organized by township and boroughs that have helped me place his ancestors in time and place, and discover a possible generation further back than I knew.

Here is one entry from 1804 that I’m trying to understand. There are no headings for the numbers, though the taxable items are labeled.

The Gorrell men are marked with the yellow highlighter. This tax list even gives me a sense of how the name was pronounced back then. It didn’t have the strong first syllable accent that our family uses.

These images were from the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center in Beaver, Pennsylvania. I had a volunteer there scan the pages from two different townships and one borough that listed Gorrell men in various spellings. They did not have the originals, but rather photocopies that were bound together by township and borough. I remembered seeing them when I visited in 2018 but I wasn’t sure I had all possible copies.

The tax entries were organized by township and then taxpayers were listed in loose alphabetical order. There are two columns of taxpayers on the page. Both Thomas and James Senior were taxed. Thomas for a horse and cow and James Senior for two horses. Looking over the whole page, one man was taxed for a sawmill, others for acreage.

One could guess about the document, that men who were taxed on the acreage owned that land, while those who were not, didn’t own the land they lived on.

I asked for advice from a genealogist who both lives in the area and does research in Western Pennsylvania, and she suggested looking at the front of the tax books for possible information. These copies do not have the front pages copied. She also suggested looking for the state laws governing taxes.

I then searched for possible laws governing the administering of the tax assessment. I could have just searched at the Internet Archive or Hathi-Trust for Pennsylvania laws, but Debbie Mieszala, on the website, Advancing Genealogist, has compiled a law library index by state, where many of their statutory and case law documents can be found if available online.

I found the following link to An Abridgment of the Laws of Pennsylvania, From 1700, to 2 April 1811. In the section on County Rates and Levies, I learned how the tax assessor was chosen, how the tax payer was assessed, and how the lists were returned. In Section VII, it described how the tax assessor assessed the property, and how they let the taxpayer know what amount was due. In Section VIII, it listed all the kinds of items that were taxable.

John Purdon, 

An abridgment of the laws of Pennsylvania, from the year one thousand seven hundred, to the second day of April, one thousand eight hundred and eleven. With references to reports of judicial decisions in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, (Farrand, Hopkins, Zantzinger, and Company, 1811.)

The assessor was to put a value to the items that would bona fide sell for “ready money.” The document goes on about how the assessor turns in the list and then collects the tax. There are sections about how the bookkeeping is done, how to collect from a taxpayer unable to pay, and so on.

 Summary
Whenever we find a document that we don’t understand, check the law that was enacted that caused the document to be created. That likely will give you clues to understand it better. The Advancing Genealogist’s website is a great place to start. She does not have all state laws, only those she has found available online. Sometimes, we can find the laws at the state’s website, but often those are the current laws. We want to find the law that was in place at the time the document was created.  

#52Ancestors: Week 29 – “A Source I Want to Understand Better.”

This is my ninth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/) at Generations Cafe. I write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways

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