Analysis:1782 Washington County Tax List. Methodology

Southwest Virginia Project

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Methodology

Data for this analysis is taken from the transcription of the 1782 personal property tax list, as presented at New River Notes. The original transcription has not been reviewed, as yet, to evaluate its accuracy though this needs to be done. In the meantime, these data are presented "as is", and may be sufficient for many peoples purposes.

The New River Notes transcriptions were based on microfilm of the original county records. ^[1] Notations on the transcription indicate that in many places the original record was torn, faded, or otherwise difficult to use. It is expected that entries for many early settlers on the original record, have been lost. A review of the microfilm may help recover additional data.

The user interested in the tax record for a particular Head of Household, is encouraged to examine the original New River Notes transcription. For convenience, an alphabetical listing of the names of settlers contained in these tax records is presented at Analysis:1782 Washington County Tax List. Heads of Household. The focus of this analysis, however, is on characterizing the socioeconomic conditions of the settlers as revealed in the personal property tax records. The objective is provide an overall context within which individual tax records can be considered.

As noted above, it is likely that many of the individual entries in these tax records have been lost. We can do little about recovering such lost information. In some cases, individual tax records have been partially preserved. Sometimes the name is only partially known, or sometimes the entries, such as the number of head of cattle owned, is what is missing. In the list of Heads of Household, whatever information is available about the individuals has been retained. For purposes of the descriptive statistics, only those entries with complete listings of tithables, horses, cattle and slaves were retained. Records with partial surviving entries were scrubbed from the analysis. Data presented in "Summary Descriptive Statistics", as an example, only includes information from complete records.