1890 New Mexico Tax Assessments:
a territorial census substitute

NMGS Press Item #B7 2003
Indexed and spiral bound. $25.00. 214 pages.

While two men could bear the same name, be born on the same day, marry women of the same name, and have children all named the same, they would rarely own the same describable property."
Arlene H. Eakle, Tax Records: A Common Source With an Uncommon Value (Salt Lake City: Family History World, 1978)

From the introduction to this book, by Karen Stein Daniel:

This project addresses tax assessment rolls in New Mexico Territory for the year 1890 as a partial census substitute, and involved the extracting of all persons and entities taxed in the Territory for that year, almost 13,000 entries, from the microfilmed rolls located at the Special Collections Library in Albuquerque, and also located at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe.

The destruction of the majority (about 99%) of the 1890 United States federal census by fire and water damage in 1921 at the Commerce Department Building in Washington, D.C. and subsequent disposal, has caused an enormous problem for genealogical researchers for years as they struggle to document their family members in the time frame from 1880 to 1900.(1)

Twenty years is a long time to be without the most widely-used tool one associates with being able to follow an ancestor's path every ten years, beginning in 1790. In that twenty-year period from 1880 to 1900, a couple could marry, have children, and at least some of the children already have moved from their parental home, or died. We become left without any readily available knowledge of their existence within the family. Additionally, in that twenty-year period, the family may have moved once or numerous times, perhaps across several counties or states, leaving us at a loss as to where to begin a new search.

As we struggle to pick up their trail, we look for sources that can partially replace the lost census, providing us a place to begin the search anew.

(1) For a list of the surviving census remnants from 1890 and other pertinent information, see Arlene Eakle and Johni Cerny, editors, The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing Company, 1984), 100-102.

Nothing survives for New Mexico.