Ancestry yesterday added the collection, Montreal, Québec, Canada, Property Tax Evaluations, 1847-1987. The original volumes are held at the Archives de Montréal.
The records have not been indexed by people’s names, so you must browse by the quartier within a specific year. Before becoming too frustrated, think of it as sitting in an archival centre, looking at an actual book, page by page.
Despite what Ancestry says about the collection, many records are written in English, not just in French. In later years, the records are bilingual.
Address and ward
Before browsing this collection, it’s essential to know where an ancestor lived. You need to first know the address and then look for the names of the ward/quartier.
The Lovell’s Montreal City Directories on the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) website will help you find an address. (To start searching, click on Montréal et sa banlieue and then Série principale. After that, most of the collection is in English or bilingual.)
To find the ward/quartier where an ancestor lived, look at the Charles Goad insurance maps, the list of fire insurance maps of Montreal, or other Montreal maps on BAnQ. The Goad maps list the wards/quartiers in English and the tax books also list the wards in English. Ancestry, however, uses the French ward/quartier names. For example, St. Lawrence Ward in the tax books is Saint Laurent on Ancestry.
Patience needed
Browsing these tax records can be challenging. In some cases, I lucked out and found an index to the names of streets, but it wasn’t at the beginning of the book. Instead, it was buried about 30 pages back. In later years, the index is often at the front. Most of the time, I couldn’t find it, but that could be due to a lack of experience with the collection.
With patience, I managed to find my great-great-great-grandfather in an 1870 tax roll and his son in a 1900 record. While I learned nothing new beyond the value of the property, I intend to keep plugging away at the collection. Perhaps I’ll learn a better way to browse the collection and make some interesting discoveries.
In the meantime, let’s hope Ancestry intends to index these records, otherwise only diehard researchers may bother looking.
People’s names are easy to read, whether handwritten, typed or typeset, so it should be possible to index the collection by first and last name.
Fingers crossed.
