1739 Orange County, Virginia Tithe List

Excepted from

Orange County, VA - Tithe Lists, 1734-1739, Charles Arthur Hoppin,    William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Jul., 1918), pp. 19-27.

Orange County was created by act of assembly August 1734, from the westernmost portion of Spotsylvania County. Orange county when first created included the now counties of Augusta, Fred erick, Culpeper, Madison, Greene, Shenandoah, Rockbridge, Rockingham in Virginia, a great proportion of the territory of the present State of West Virginia, and the whole of the present State of Kentucky.

Year 1739

A List of Tithables in the precinct of James Pickett, Constable.

Thomas Rucker                 3    Walter Vaughan             1

John Howard                   1    John Rogers                3

Wm Crawford                   2    Walter Lenord              3

Benja Coward                  3    Thos Brown                 2

Richd Maulden                 3    John Shelton               1

Thos Morgan                   2    Wm Loggins                 1

Benja Thomson                 1    Jonathan Gibson's Quarter  4

Major LeVaune [?]             3    Martin Trapp               1

Thos Jackson                  6    John Bush [or Rush?]       2

Thoss Coleman                 1    John Forrester             3

Fras Pickett                  1    Wm. Williamson             1

Michael Gary                  2    John Farrow                1

Isaac Tinsley                 1    Moses Battley's Quarter    5

Henry Ware                    3    Leonard Phillips           2

Wm Rucker                     1    Patrick Walsh              3

Wm Pierce                     2    John McDaniel              2

Peter Rucker                  6    David Phillips             2

John Gath                     3    John Zachary               2

Thos Stanton                  1    Wm Phillips                5

Thos Zachary                  1    Robert Morgan              1

David Zachary                 2    Benja Cave                 5

Ann Stogdill's Quarter        2    Blan Ballard's Quarter     2

Wm Offil                      1    John Grymes Esqr Quarter  15

Jonas Archer                  2    John Stone                 1

Jas Stevens                   1    Michael Holt               3



From Library of Virginia website: http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/tithables_vanote.htm

The noun "tithable" when it appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records of Virginia refers to a person who paid, or for whom someone else paid, one of the taxes that the General Assembly imposed for the support of the civil government in the colony.

The terms "tithe" and "tithable" had ancient roots in English law and referred to the tax of the tenth portion of the livestock and certain other agricultural products for the support of the church. The term "tithable" developed a different and restricted meaning in seventeenth-century Virginia, where it came to apply to persons on whom the colony's tax laws assessed a poll tax or capitation tax, literally a tax on each "head."

By 1658, when the assembly passed a law defining "What Persons are Tithable," a "tithable" was a member of the potentially productive labor force: free caucasian males age sixteen or older plus "all negroes imported whether male or female, and Indian servants male or female however procured, being sixteen years of age" (Hening, Statutes at Large, 1:454-455). Subsequent laws made the immigrants' descendants tithable, too. Slaves and servants did not pay their own taxes; their owners or masters were therefore "tithable" for themselves and for the taxes on their servants and slaves.

Lists of tithables for a county or a household, then, do not enumerate anyone under the age of sixteen or any adult white woman unless they were heads of households. Relatively few tithables lists are extant.