Following is a transcription of the 1782 Tyrrell County Tax
List done by Art Lawton, our Tyrrell County "cousin"
living in New Jersey. Many thanks for sharing this with us Art.
The 1782 Tyrrell County Tax list, being only two years prior
to the 1784 Tax List, will obviously consist mostly of the same
taxpayers. However, rather than being redundant, the two taken
together are useful for comparison and confirmation. While the
order of the 1784 list is alphabetical, this list (if there is an
order at all) appears to be by visitation or geographic location.
The pages, forty-four in all, were not numbered by the author,
but have since been numbered by stamp. The 1782 list contains
the specifics of the property which was taxable. This was
usually acres of land, slaves, horses and cattle. The list also
occasionally makes reference to place names and family relations.
Several taxpayers are denoted as "Menonist" which is presumed to
mean Mennonite. Finally, several of the landless taxpayers, who
paid only a poll tax, were further qualified in the latter pages
of the document as married or single.
The 1782 tax list is legible and the handwriting is well
formed, but not nearly so well as the 1784 tax list. There was
some difficultly in deciphering perhaps five percent of the
entries. About ten names would not have been transcribed
correctly had the 1784 list not been available for comparison.
The spellings of five names still remain in doubt, as there are
no corresponding 1784 entries for comparison.
The original document from which this transcription was
made, is located in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh,
NC. That document is actually a 1783 copy of a prior list(s)
presumably produced in 1782. This is noteworthy to the extent
that any copy process introduces the element of error. To wit:
there are five entries wherein the taxes for a person had been
totaled incorrectly. It is not known if the errors were made in
the 1782 tax list and copied verbatim to the 1783 copy or whether
the errors were introduced in the copy process. In either event,
each error is maintained in this transcript and is appropriately
noted. This, of course, leaves unresolved the interesting
question of whether the 1782 taxpayer was incorrectly charged the
amount in error.
In those instances where transcription is in doubt, notes
have been included in the text. Anything in brackets [ ] is not
part of the original text. A question mark within brackets, [?],
indicates that there was difficulty in reading original text. In
these instances, the reader may want to consult the original
document. Occasionally, if there was some doubt about a
particular letter combination, alternative spellings are provided
in brackets.
The use of [sic] indicates that the spelling presented is
exactly as given in the original, but the reader is likely to
have encountered significantly variant spellings in other
documents. The transcriber has presented these other
possibilities.