1841 Tax Valuation Records

Museum Monday

1841 Tax Valuation Book

It was a great week for me at the Scarborough Historical Society Museum. On Tuesday, three of us traveled up to the Maine State Library in Augusta and began working on scanning several Tax Valuation Books from the Town of Scarborough. They have a Zeutschel OS 12002 – it is a multi-camera book scanner that creates high-resolution images of bound and oversized materials. It is capable of correcting for page curvature as well as recognizing and indexing printed text. The scanned images were then combined into a PDF file. A “Scarborough Books” collection was created and the PDF file uploaded with some metadata information. Thank you so much for the assistance of Adam Fisher of the Maine State Library for his help and assistance in this Project.

The Valuation books provide information about property owners and voters who were Scarborough residents and some info about non-residents who owned property in Scarborough. If you have ancestors who lived in Scarborough in 1841, this book may provide information of interest. It gives things like how many acres of land they owned and how it was being used as well as how many horses, cows, and pigs they owned.

We also have Valuations Books for 1875, 1890, 1892, and 1900 digitized. I’ll be working on getting those images available online over the next few weeks.

• The Scarborough Historical Society post about the 1841 image is here.
• The actual download from Digital Maine is here.

The 1841 Scarborough Tax Valuation Book is a great resource to add texture to your family history and genealogical research.