It seems appropriate that Ancestry.com chose April 15 to
announce a new online database: U.S. federal income tax records.
As part of an agreement in which the company paid $46,000 to the
National Archives in Washington, Ancestry.com has digitized and
indexed federal income tax records from 1862 through 1918. The
site's IRS Tax Records collection at http://content.ancestry.com
/iexec/?htx=List&dbid=1264&o_iid=23560&o_lid=23560 is an
alphabetical listing of annual income as well as taxable
possessions, such as Andrew Carnegie's gold watch and carriage.
Another document shows President Abraham Lincoln's $25,000
income (about $566,000 today) for 1864, the year before his
assassination. His tax bill: $1,296. Andrew Carnegie earned
$84,000 the same year, the equivalent of about $2 million today.
According to Megan Smolenyak, Ancestry.com's chief family
historian, the government first imposed a federal income tax in
1862 on affluent families who made at least $600 annually. We
can assume that very few families earned