TITHABLE The noun "tithable" when it appears in the seventeenth and eighteenth century records of Virginia refers to a person who paid, or for whom someone else paid, one of the taxes that the General Assembly imposed for the support of the civil government in the colony. The terms "tithe" and "tithable" had ancient roots in English law and referred to the tax of the tenth portion of the livestock and certain other agricultural products for the support of the church. The term "tithable" developed a different and restricted meaning in seventeenth century Virginia, where it came to apply to persons on whom the colony's tax laws assessed a poll tax or capitation tax, literally a tax on each "head." By 1658, when the assembly passed a law defining "What Persons are Tithable," a "tithable" was a member of the potentially productive labor force: free caucasian males age sixteen or older plus "all negroes imported whether male or female, and Indian servants male or female however procured, being sixteen years of age" (Hening, Statutes at Large, 1:454-455). Subsequent laws made the immigrants' descendants tithable, too. Slaves and servants did not pay their own taxes; their owners or masters were therefore "tithable" for themselves and for the taxes on their servants and slaves. Lists of tithables for a county or a household, then, do not enumerate anyone under the age of sixteen or any adult white woman unless they were heads of households. Relatively few tithables lists are extant. The Library of Virginia has full or partial lists of tithables for only about three dozen counties, as follows.