Annual tax assessment rolls are the most important municipal records for Toronto genealogical research. These are valuable resources that can help you track changes in family circumstances. Depending on their date, they may tell you who owned a property and who lived on it, with addresses, occupations, ages and other information about buildings and their occupants.
Take builder Joseph Gearing for example, whose home in the Yonge-Carlton area of the city is pictured below in an image from 1871. (Look closely and you’ll also see some of its inhabitants!). The 1871 assessment roll for St. James Ward tells us, among other things, that there were actually 11 people living there, along with a dog, a cow and five hogs, and that the property value was pegged at about $8,000 at the time.
You’ll find the most complete collection of Toronto municipal records at the City of Toronto Archives. If you can’t get to the Archives in person, you can access an extensive digitized collection of pre-1900 assessment records for all of the City’s former municipalities through FamilySearch. Most of those municipalities had relatively small populations so the records are fairly easy to browse. The exception is the old City of Toronto, which was divided into densely populated wards. But, thanks to the work of Toronto Branch volunteers, that research is going to be a lot less daunting than you might think!
Our volunteers have created a unique finding aid, which breaks down the contents of each digitized film on the FamilySearch website ward by ward. This Finding Aid is still a work in progress, but it’s nearly complete, with all of the years from 1834 to 1889 now indexed. Visit our Municipal Records page now to learn more about how you can use tax assessment rolls in your family history research and explore our Finding Aid to Wards.
