Through the Tax Assessor's Eyes

Based primarily upon the original tax assessor ledgers for 1813 and 1818 housed at the Baltimore City Archives, this work identifies all free blacks and slave owners in Baltimore by name, race, address, occupation, names/ages of slaves owned (if any), and sometimes by nationality and other particulars. The authors have supplemented the information found in the tax ledgers with data from city directories, census records, and books and journal articles about 19th-century Baltimore and Maryland. They examined newspapers, court records and biographies of some of the more prominent residents mentioned in the assessments so as to illuminate their lives in a number of biographical sketches. Genealogists, and particularly those of African descent, will find this information invaluable for their research, as it specifies the streets their forebears lived on, the occupations they followed, and the property, both real and human, on which they paid taxes. African-American genealogists will be able to discover whether their ancestors were free or enslaved and, if enslaved, to whom they "belonged."