The 1842 Huron District Assessment Rolls are the earliest official population and land assessment record for the Townships that belonged to the Huron District at that time. As such, they are quite useful to researchers looking for ancestors.
Through municipal adjustments in later years, the old Huron District townships have ended up in the counties of Huron, Perth, and Middlesex.
A microfilmed version of these important documents is kept at the Goderich Branch Library. To make the assessment rolls available more widely it was decided the best way was through the World Wide Web (WWW). This will allow researchers to quickly and easily search these early documents. For an explanation of which parts of the original document we chose to include in this web site, see the Notes: Column Headings page.
Also, in the original Assessment Rolls (and therefore the microfilm archive) the entries aren't in alphabetical order and the hand-writing is often less than ideal, which has, until this point, made them difficult to use when looking for a specific individual, particularly if the researcher doesn't know in which Township that individual resided. The computerization of these records has allowed us to cross-check names with other sources when the writing is ambiguous (for more information about the accuracy of this online version of the 1842 assessment rolls, see the Notes: Accuracy and Sources of Error page), organize the entries in each Township alphabetically and create an alphabetized "Master List" of all of the entries from the entire district.
For the purposes of this project, an alphabetized listing is the most practical format. It may be useful to remember that the original listings are in the order that people were located along the road, as visited by the assessor.