Tax records!

[Lesley Robertson]

I've just returned from my annual holiday in Scotland. This year, instead of spending all my Edinburgh time grabbing BMDs, I headed for the National Archives and had a WONDERFUL time. I'd gone originally to look at the Window Tax registers, to get an idea of when certain big houses had been built, but these are of limited use if one is interested in the whole community as you didn't get listed if you had fewer than 6 windowed rooms. However, someone had mentioned a single register of Consolidated Tax returns as being of more use as these included an Inhabited House list complete with names of Heads of Households. These were very useful, and sent me further into the lists as other taxes mentioned included Horses (Riding), Horses (Working), Carts and (my favourite) Clocks and Watches. This last included a specification as to whether the watch was gold or just silver or metal, ending a disucssion I'd been having with someone as to which farm was the more prosperous (the farmer I was backing had the only gold watch in the parish, plus a clock and silver watch, the farmer the descendant was backing only had a silver watch).... Interestingly, the Minister didn't have a watch or clock.

All of these records are dismissed as being of little genealogical value in the official book on how to use the NAS archives, but it's really very useful to step off the marked path sometimes, and see what crumbs can be found (one of the cart owners was someone I've been trying to trace for a while - not an active member of the Kirk, he'd left little trace).
Lesley