If you are interested in family history and think that one of your ancestors was a householder in Louth in the period 1823 to 1851 this website may give you information of a type not present in other sources. The databases on this site list thousands of names and properties and you can search them (either online or after downloading them) using your internet browser. Many listed individuals were unrecorded in the census enumerators’ books, because they died before 1841.
Typically the ratepayers corresponded to the heads of households found in the census enumerators’ books. In some respects the rating lists give much more limited information than do the censuses. In particular the ratepayers’ occupations are not stated (except by implication eg someone having a slaughterhouse was presumably a butcher); nor are ages or details of families.
However the rating lists often give better information about the economic status of the people listed than do the censuses. To take an extreme example: the 1841 census enumeration of Westgate shows M Sophia Ansell and her seven domestic servants; it is obvious that Miss Ansell was a wealthy woman. On the previous page of the enumerator’s book Stephen Gray appears, described as a merchant (which could mean anything) but sharing his house with John Carter, a bookbinder and his family; the census record gives no sign of affluence. However the rating list shows that Gray lived in a relatively large house and owned and occupied extensive properties including warehouses, coal and timber yards and agricultural land and buildings. He he also owned, but did not occupy, the King’s Head, probably the town’s largest public house, another public house and many small houses (Grays Road is still a Louth street).
The purpose of the rating lists was to fix “rateable values” for houses and other properties. These values were based on (but usually not the same as) the annual rents that might be charged on the open market. The rating lists show the streets where the ratepayers lived, but not house numbers, which in Louth were not introduced until 1860. The lists also show whether the named ratepayers owned the houses that they occupied and whether they occupied other land or buildings.