This is my last purchase on Ebay for a while–the 1862 Assessor’s List for Saint Mary’s Township in Hancock County, Illinois.
It’s too far east in the county for me to have any family there, but I went ahead and purchased it anyway. We’ll take some images from it and post them after it arrives as they’ll make nice illustrations for future blog posts. Tax records are an underutilized resource during this time period in many United States locations.
After I’ve made digital images of selected portions of the book, it will be donated to a library or archives. I can’t rescue every item, but this one was old enough that I thought I’d try and see if I could win the auction–but I did have a limit.
Stay tuned-the assessor’s oath is supposed to be an interesting one.
2 Responses
I’m curious…When you get this list, please let us know how legible (or not) the pages are. I’m always a little nervous about buying something that old unless I have it in my hand, able to see for myself.
That’s always the problem with purchasing something that one can’t be in the same physical location with. Legibility of documents this age can vary greatly for a variety of reasons. There were images of pages included with this one on the site and the ones shown looked fairly legible. We’ll post an update.