Inventory of Colonial Old Chester Tax Assessments

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Sources 3 Data

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Introduction

Township tax lists provide a useful source of information for persons living in a particular area in
Pennsylvania during the Colonial period.
These lists were primarily limited to land owners, usually males.
There are four main classes of persons appearing routinely in these lists:

Land Owners, of 21 years or older

Freemen, over the age of 21 but not owning land

Inmates, tithables who did not own land (eg, renters)

Non-Residential Land owners, above the age of 21, owning land, but not living within the township

Most lists only show the "land owners", though the person listed may actually have been a tenant rather than the actual land owner. ^[1]
Persons whom the tax collector considered elderly or infirm were sometimes not listed.
Widows are commonly identified as the land owner in the years following their husbands death,
though if they remarried they would no longer be assessed.

Tax records normally would be expected to begin shortly after a township was organized.
There are some indications that taxes were not collected in some areas for a good many years after the township formed.

In any case, most tax records do not seem to have survived.  

The following data is intended to provide an index to surviving tax records in Chester County.
Data is being collected in an attempt to identify when the townships were organized.
In many cases a specific date of organization has not been found.
In the table below, grey areas indicate when tax records would not be expected to exist,
simply because the township did not exist at the time shown.

Sources

Various persons have made transcriptions of the surviving tax records.
Some of these transcriptions are to be found in Futhey and Cope's History of Chester County published in XXXX.
Others have been transcribed in recent years and placed in various archives.
In some cases these transcriptions are based on the LDS microfilm records held by the Chester County Historical Society,
and in some cases, they are simply retranscriptions of Futhey and Cope's transcriptions.

Major sources for these transcriptions on the internet can be found at:

USGW Archives,

Chester PA Roots

Many of these transcriptions were prepared by Fred Kelso or Sandra Ferguson.

The following table provides links to these transcriptions. If the date of the transcription appears alone, the it points to a USGW Archives.
If it appears with a subscript "R", then it comes from Chester PA-Roots.
The inclusion of the letters "A", "B" following the date, indicate that there are two alterative transcriptions on the site in question.
The transcriptions may or may not be identical, and both should be examined.
There are probably other transcriptions available; these will be added if and when found.

Data

The following data is specific to the area now lying within Chester County.
Areas to the west of the Ooctoraro, north of the Schullykill, and in the area later formed into Delaware County, are not shown.
Only townships that formed prior to the Revoultion are shown.