Exactly. The assessments reflected the special interests du jour, with as much or as little sense as tax laws today. Just for reference, the 1783 Somerset-collected categories were those following. Comparing to those I showed the other day for Worcester, we see that the So assessors were locally instructed to be more thorough on nature and quality of the land, but that the other basic statistical tallies came down the same from above: Another important point overlooked by almost everybody is the utility of these lists as a census, certainly better (with all the other detail), than, say, the early Federal censuses (especially the missing one in Somerset). John Somerset-tabulated categories (* = not in Worcester tabulations) Taxpayer Names of Lands Acres Original Grant * Acres * If Resurvey * If Escheat * Surplus * Deficiency * Improvements * Situation * General Quality of the Soil * Quantity of Arable Land * Quantity of Wood Land * Quantity of Meadow * Value of Land Slaves Males, Females under 8 / Value Males, Females 8 -14 / Value Males 14-45 /Value Females 14-36 /Value Males 45+, Females 36+ / Value Plate Ounces / Value Horses Black Cattle Value Value of other Property Total Amount Assessment thereon White Inhabitants Male Female ___________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: Dave & Jane Kearney <[email protected]> It would be interesting to know how static the "tax list" of taxable items was ... for instance, was the item, "black cattle," on the list for 100 years, or did the list change significantly over time? (Don't laugh or chortle, but when I first read the list as posted here on the list, I thought that perhaps "black cattle" was a garbled line accidentally put together from two lines, one referring to bovine cattle, and another one for those of our ancestors who were treated as human cattle of the day.) One can imagine that the specific items to be tax tablulated at any given point in time might have been influenced by many of the same sorts of sometimes seemingly mysterious forces that shape modern tax policy. Why are some things taxed and others not? Whose ox (or black cow) was being gored in the days of yore presumably was the result of the political process, with outcomes that probably usually made good sense to the government, if not all the time to the taxees.