"In the absence of the 1790, 1800, and 1810 censuses of Georgia, these
early tax lists are a godsend, standing in as almost perfect substitutes for the
missing enumerations and in many ways improving on the detail found in most old
census records. The counties for which tax records are provided, with their
years of coverage, are as follows:
Camden 1794, 1809
Chatham 1806
Glynn 1790, 1794
Hancock 1812
Lincoln 1818
Montgomery 1797, 1798, 1805, 1806
Pulaski 1818
Richmond 1818
Warren 1794, 1805, 1818
Wilkes 1792, 1793, 1794
"For each tax list a great deal of information is provided that cannot be
found in any other record source. For example, each tax list generally gives the
name of the taxpayer, the name of the adjoining property owner, and the name of
the original grantee of land--information impossible to find in a census record
and of the utmost importance in genealogical research. In addition, though less
relevant genealogically, the tax lists identify the number of slaves attached to
the property, the watercourses, the acreage, and the value of the land.
"Valuable as they are, when these lists were originally compiled and
published by Georgia State Historian Ruth Blair in 1926, they were not published
with an index and were almost impossible to use. A dozen years later, however, a
new State Historian, Mrs. J. E. Hays, prepared a complete index to all 25,000
taxpayers and adjoining property owners and published it as a 1938 W.P.A.
project. The two parts, the 1926 Digests and the 1938 Index, are finally united
in this reprint edition which can now claim to be the foremost source in early
Georgia genealogy. To the genealogist searching for his Georgia roots, this is
the true starting point of any serious research."
Some Early Tax Digests of Georgia
