How to use tax records to research your historic home
- Mark Belloni
- Dec 19, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 24
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, researchers can identify major developments, such as the construction of a house.
Are historic tax records accessible?
One of the biggest challenges of using tax records for historic home research is accessibility. Availability varies widely by state and county, and some records may not be open to the public. And of course, as is the case with all historical records, tax records may just not exist anymore due to being lost, destroyed, or never properly preserved. Fires, natural disasters, and even routine record purges have led to the disappearance of valuable tax documents, making research more challenging.
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 documents include:
Property legal descriptions
Owner names
Assessed tax values
Taxes paid
County-level access: an example
To illustrate my point on accessibility, lets look at two Indiana counties. Hendricks County astonishingly has all of its tax duplicates from 1841-1940 digitized and available online. Hamilton County, on the other hand, has nothing digitized, and its historic tax duplicates are not accessible to the public. In order to use them, you have to request a search to be done through the county treasurer’s office. On top of this, the oldest tax duplicate record the Hamilton County treasurer has is from 1859, so years are missing.
If you’re able to access tax duplicates yourself, they are relatively simple to search. They are usually arranged by year, then by civil township, and finally alphabetically by landowner’s last name.
Using tax records to date a historic home
Before consulting tax 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. Built in the Italianate style, it was likely constructed between 1855 and 1890, the peak years of that architectural trend. I therefore only gathered values from the tax duplicates for the years 1855-1890 because it is unlikely my house was built outside of this time range.
By reviewing these records, I discovered a $600 jump in improvement value between 1880 and 1881—a strong indication that significant construction took place. (Remember, 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 tax record 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 jump in the improvement value, these additional pieces of evidence suggest that my house was likely built or significantly expanded in 1880 after the Irwins purchased the property.
And sometimes you just get incredibly lucky in historical research. In my case, after concluding that the house was built in 1880, I discovered a short newspaper item from May 1880 that confirmed my findings:
![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.
Use tax records for your house research
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.
