Germans from Russia Taxation

Family history researchers use tax records to learn when a person lived in a certain town, that is, to determine residence. Tax records are often used as a substitute for censuses. The Family History Library has relatively few tax records. Most available tax records are kept at county and state or provincial archives in the United States and Canada. Most tax lists are not indexed and researchers usually need to know the community where an ancestor lived in order to find him on tax lists.

The Russian revision lists (ревизкие сказки = revizkiye skazki) are taxation censuses taken from 1719 to 1858. They are important for researching Germans in Russia. They are described in more detail in the “Census” section of this outline.