ROOTS & BRANCHES

Sure, it was 4:30 in the afternoon on a holiday weekend. And I was away from home at that.

But when a professional colleague comes looking for help about records of the county in which you live .. well, you try to help out. The colleague was Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais from Burlington, Vermont, and she reached out asking about mid-1800s tax records from the city of Reading in Berks County.

My initial thought that Berks History (the former Historical Society of Berks County) had them but Desmarais had already checked that angle. The society only had microfilms of the tax records through 1840.

I recalled that some years ago that 19^th century tax records were stored offsite in the county’s agriculture center and it basically required an act of Congress to access them. Her need was to find when someone arrived in Reading between 1840–1850, and then what happened to the property after his 1869 death.

“I can find a deed of purchase but not a deed of sale and he still lived at the same address when he died,” Desmarais said. “No estate record either.”

Since she had not been able to find a deed when the property was sold, I suggested she do a deed chain back from the present day, which is facilitated by the historical deeds and most other property records having been put online through the diligent efforts of the former Berks Recorder of Deeds Frederick Sheeler.

But the key to getting started was finding the reference to the present-day owner. For that, I went to the Berks Mapping Department website, which has as you might expect a parcel map of the county.

With Desmarais suppling the address—which thankfully had not eliminated or subsumed into a larger parcel—I was able to find the owner’s name and reference to when it was last sold.

Desmarais diligently went backwards in time through 17 transactions, making it back to an 1879 deed that cited an 1875 sheriff’s deed.

This gave her another temporary dead end since the sheriff’s deeds—times when a property is auctioned off to pay taxes or other obligations—are kept separately from the transactions in the Recorder of Deeds office.

And, of course, they’re not in the Sheriff’s office, either; you find them in the Prothonotary’s office.

The document Desmarais wanted isn’t available online but could be requested by postal mail. “It’s like old-fashioned genealogy again!” Desmarais said.

I’ve written several “Roots & Branches” columns over the years lauding how there’s absolutely nothing better than tapping into the local expertise of genealogists and historians with intimate knowledge of an area.

This time, I guess, I proved the point with myself.