It is also useful for looking at the entire community in which an ancestor lived and identifying his close neighbors and associates. This writer found a gold mine in the printed tax lists that survive from early Pennsylvania. There are twelve volumes of tax lists, the earliest 1765 and the latest 1788. Taxpayers are listed in the order visited or reported, not in alphabetical order. I also found there the Van Etten family, which ties into Jacob s distaff line.
Land records can be a feast for the genealogist.
In addition to these military grants, the researcher will also find records of the purchases of land from the State of Pennsylvania after 1776, listed by name of warrantee, number of acres, and date of the grant. So these books go far into the nineteenth century and can be used for many periods of research besides the colonial and Revolutionary War periods. The good news here is the third series has one of the best indexes in the entire set. The last four volumes of the third series are an every-name index, which you should examine very carefully to find records generated by your ancestor. The fourth series is a collection of the private papers of the governors of Pennsylvania from 1681 to 1903.