My friends - I want to stop by and give you the solution to the latest Skills Puzzler before this day is gone completely. Before I launch into the explanation of the solution, I think that I should point out that these Puzzlers are aimed at trying to help us hone our skills a bit and to find ways to perform research more efficiently. As a result, when I present the narratives for these puzzlers, some parts of the background information are not given, simply to make the narrative as short as possible. On this puzzler, about 6 folks asked how I knew that the Cornelius Knothead, shown as the head of household in the 1840 census, was the male listed as 50-60, since the head of the household could be a son of an older man living in that household, and the 1840 census does not connect the name of the head of household with any male in any age bracket. In this case, there was a male aged 5-10 and one aged 50-60. It was obvious that the male aged 5-10 was not the head of the household, so I did not present anything about the breakdown of the ages of the males in the 1840 census, just to save some words in the narrative. I am always heartened, however, by such questions, as they show that we have very sharp people with analytical minds with us on the JP List. The nub of the whole purpose of this Puzzler was to see if we could take a tax roll series which indicated that Knothead was there for several years and then suddenly disappeared, and couple that fact with what few records which were extant and try to determine what our next move should be. There is no question that we would all want to check those surviving marriage records, in the event that Knothead might have given a consent or appeared in some fashion therein. The same is true for checking the 1850 census records for other Knothead families(could Cornelius be living with a daughter or son's family, etc.). But can we shortcut the process a little and save some time? We can do so in some cases by being aware of what state laws may provide insofar as tax relief is concerned. In this case, the key time frame is the 1844-45 period. Reading the court minutes page by page, we found that on 22 May 1845, Cornelius Knothead appeared before the court and requested to be made exempt from paying taxes, as he had "...attained the age of 55 years on April 14th last...". In the state in question, men 55 and over were exempt from paying taxes. From that, we learned both his age and his birth date. He does not himself again appear in the court minutes that exist. However, again reading page by page, in 1848, there is a brief mention in the court minutes for the October term, in which three commissioners are appointed to "...lay off the dower lands for the widow Knothead, relict of Cornelius Knothead, deceased". From that, we learned that he had died sometime probably in 1848. Cornelius does not appear in any part of the existing marriage records. Anytime that someone suddenly disappears from a tax roll, especially if we know them to be in the 50-60 age group, we should make the court minutes our next stop, since men had to petition the court to be made exempt from paying taxes, and very few of them ever missed doing that(times do not change much, do they?)right at the very time that they turned 55, or whatever the age may have been that would cause them to become exempt. Court minutes are usually among the last records that most of us consult, because they are almost always unindexed. In this case, they should be our next stop, after the tax rolls, given what we know about the age of Cornelius. Does this mean that *every* person who reached the age at which he could claim an exemption actually did so? No, but we cannot assume that someone, for whatever reason(lack of proof of age, did not know his own age, lack of knowledge of the law, etc.), did not come forward and request the exemption. And we have to remember, too, that state laws governing who could be exempted(clerymen, public officials, etc.) from taxes changed regularly over the years, so we need to be aware of those laws and what they directed for each year taxes. Knowing the various possibilities which might cause a man to drop from a tax roll can be useful in pointing us in the direction we should follow in our next research step. -B ============================================================