Useful Hints For Reading Tax Records

Things to keep in mind about tax rolls:

• Occasionally a year or two will be missing in our tax records; if the year is not listed, we do not have it in our archives. You may be able to find missing years at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s archives.
• Occasionally, two tax documents will be listed for a given year: a blotter and an assessment. Think of the blotter as the rough draft version. They should contain the same information, but sometimes one or the other is more legible.
• The farther back you go, the less consistency you will find in the tax rolls. Names can be misspelled, writing can be difficult to read depending on the assessor’s writing and the condition of the books themselves, and property descriptions are minimal.
• The tax rolls for the towns are generally organized by Section number, beginning with Section 1.
• If you are looking for a property in the Villages of Blue Mounds or Mount Horeb prior to their year of incorporation, the platted areas of these communities will be listed in the Town of Blue Mounds tax books. They might be listed either after Section 36 or within the Section in which these communities fall (Sections 6 and 7 for the Village of Blue Mounds or Sections 11 and 12 for the Village of Mount Horeb). After incorporation, the villages have their own tax books.
• There are other resources that will be invaluable to you as you research a property. At a minimum, these are https://accessdane.danecounty.gov/ for current property descriptions and locations (see Property Descriptions and Access Dane link), and historical plat maps (see Plat Maps on our Online Resources page for links).
• Improvement values refer to houses, barns, or any other built environment. The earliest tax records do not show specific property improvement values; in order to determine if a property has an improvement, compare its value to other nearby properties (or to previous or later tax assessments).
• Tax records will not give you specific dates on which land is transferred; the records will only show who owned the property when the annual assessments took place. Keep in mind that land could transfer between individuals several times in the same year.
• Personal Property, listed at the end of the tax rolls, often provides further information about property owners, including livestock, automobiles, watches or pianos they owned. Personal property is listed in alphabetical order by last name.
• If you are trying to figure out how a house or property you see on an historic maps lines up with current roads/Section lines (for example, to determine if a house on an older map could still be present), use the maps available on Access Dane (see Property Descriptions and Access Dane link).​

Researching tax rolls can be complicated and confusing, but the more time you spend with them, the easier it gets!