How to use tax records to research your historic home
- Mark Belloni
- Dec 19, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 8
Tax records are one of my favorite sources to use when researching historic homes. Generally, I rely on them to help solidify a house’s construction date. Much of my work focuses on rural houses, where tax records are especially valuable in the absence of other sources, such as insurance maps or well-established newspapers. For any given property, tax records typically list the value of improvements separately from the value of the land. By tracking these values over time, historians can identify major developments, such as the construction of a house.
Tax record availability
One of the biggest challenges with using tax records for historic home research is availability. Availability varies widely by both state and county. In some places, historic tax records may be completely inaccessible to the public.
Further, as is the case with all historical records, tax records may just not exist due to being lost or destroyed. Fires, natural disasters, and even routine record purges have led to the disappearance of these valuable records.
In Indiana, the most useful tax records are tax duplicates—records created when county auditors and treasurers reconciled tax assessments at the end of each year. These records include:
Property legal descriptions
Owner names
Assessed tax values
Taxes paid
County-level access: an example
To illustrate my point on availability, lets compare Hendricks County, Indiana and Hamilton County, Indiana.
Hendricks County astonishingly has nearly all of its tax duplicates from 1841-1940 digitized and available online. Hamilton County, on the other hand, has no records digitized, and its physical historic tax duplicates are not accessible to the public. In order to use them, you have to request a search through the county treasurer’s office. Additionally, Hamilton County only has select years available; many are missing.
If you are fortunate enough to have tax duplicates available for your house or property, they are relatively easy to search. Generally, they are arranged by year, then by civil township, and finally alphabetically by the past landowner’s last name.
Using tax records to date a historic home
As a reminder, the key in using historic tax records to help narrow down a construction date is to track the "value of improvements" of a property over time.
Before you start diving into the records, it’s helpful to have a defined year range to focus on so you don’t waste time collecting data from irrelevant years.
Take my house, for instance. A simple Italianate farmhouse, it was likely constructed between 1860 and 1885, the years when the Italianate style was most popular. Therefore, when researching, I would start by only gathering improvement values for the years 1860-1885.
Next, you need to also know the name of the person who owned the property in the years that you are searching. This could be the same person, or it could be multiple people. Historic deeds, transfer books, and county atlases can help establish a chain of ownership.
In my case, two separate people owned the property: Benjamin Jones from 1860 to 1877, and William T. Irwin from 1878-1885.
I then consult the tax records, finding the values of improvement listed under Benjamin for the years 1860 to 1877, and then the values listed under William for the years 1878-1885.
No large increases were discernable under either men from 1860-1880. However, as soon as I moved from the 1880 tax record to the 1881 record, I discovered a $600 jump. This is a strong indication that some sort of major construction happened on the property. (Note: tax values aren't based on market value but on a county’s assessed value for tax purposes.)
This jump can be seen in the records below:
Verifying your findings
While tax records provide useful clues, they only offer indirect evidence of a home’s construction. A rise in improvement value could reflect other additions—barns, fences, or outbuildings.
To confirm construction, it’s crucial to corroborate tax data with additional sources. In the case of my house, I know from land and deed records that the Irwin family acquired the property in 1878. Furthermore, a probate claim against the estate of the owners prior to the Irwins detailed work done on a house that was smaller than the one that stands today.
Along with the increase in the improvement value from 1880 to 1881, these additional pieces of evidence suggest that my house was likely built or significantly expanded in 1880 after the Irwins purchased the property.
A short newspaper item from May 1880 confirmed this assertion:
![A snippet from a historic newspaper with worn and faded text. It mentions "Mr. Irwin, of Brown [township], and Frank H...," describing their start of brick manufacturing to build new residences during the summer. The quality of the text makes some words difficult to decipher.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4e9a3d_1542ac0c0804459d90d46dd1c73d13ed~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_317,h_96,al_c,q_80,enc_avif,quality_auto/4e9a3d_1542ac0c0804459d90d46dd1c73d13ed~mv2.jpg)
The text is a bit difficult to decipher due to the physical state of the digitized page, but it reads, “Mr. Irwin, of Brown [township], and Frank Hufford, of this township [Lincoln], have begun the manufacture of brick, out of which they will erect new residences this summer.”
A near-perfect corroboration of the tax record.
Although often overlooked, tax records are an invaluable resource for uncovering key facts about historic homes and properties. Using them to track improvement values and corroborating these findings with other historical sources can create compelling evidence.
Whether you’re a local historian, a preservationist, or simply a homeowner curious about your house’s past, tax records are a valuable, underutilized resource worth exploring.
