The Maryland State Archives has made the Levy Court Assessment Records for 1830-1850 available to read from home. Previously, they had been microfilmed, then digitized, but could only be read on computers in the MSA Research Room in Annapolis.
Some records are missing, as you would expect, but most are intact and provide information on both Real Estate and Personal Property. They are arranged by district (the “Hundreds”) and then alphabetically. After searching for your target names be sure to check the end of each list, where any name that was missed is added. I just found a “B” surname at the end of one record.
The real estate records use the names of original patents (like Anchovie Hills, Craignight, and Good Luck) so it is easy to correlate with wills and family histories where the properties are named.
Personal Property, of course, includes enslaved people. With one exception, names are not provided, so the information is more like that in the 1850 & 1860 slave schedules. The exception is 1833, when–for unknown reasons–the names of enslaved people were included. So you might want to start there. If you’re working back from the post-emancipation slave statistics, start in 1850 and see if you can correlate with reported slave ownership of 1864. And: if you find the names of enslaved people in any year other than 1833, be sure to tell the rest of us! Send me an email via the Contact tab and I’ll post it with hearty thanks.
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY
LEVY COURT
(Assessment Record)
1830-1850
CM784
https://guide.msa.maryland.gov/pages/series.aspx?id=CM784
This link will take you to the C784 page in the Guide to Government Records. When you click on “Details” for the file you want to see, the next page will say “Available on the Archives’ searchroom computers.” Ignore that and click on “View images individually.” This opens the PDF and allows you to page through the whole document. It was working pretty well for me this morning.
I’m taking a bit of a victory lap here, as this change was prompted by my correspondence with an archivist about the possibility of purchasing the whole set and putting them on this website. Archivists (at the MSA or anywhere) don’t have time to constantly review access questions for everything in their collections. Just bringing something to their attention might get the issue on their to-do list.
This is not the first time that my requests have resulted in an improvement of access. So the lesson here is: ask! Be politely persistent! Explain why you need the records.
Happy hunting!
