Wilkes County was one of the eight counties established and named by the constitution of Georgia in 1777. It was created from lands acquired from the Creek and Cherokee Indians called the "ceded lands." Important to note is that the original Wilkes County territory included all of Elbert County (1790), all of Oglethorpe County (1793), part of Warren County (1793), all of Lincoln County (1896), part of Greene County (1802), and part of Taliaferro (1825 and 1828).

What early tax digests indicate: (1) Amount of taxes a person was to pay (not what was paid) (2) Lack of land and slaves and thus little need for an estate to be probated (3) Age of a person - when he first appears paying a poll tax (4) Land, whose land it bordered, and to whom it was granted - if taxes are paid on land, then ownership is denoted and a deed should be on record (5) Land in other counties and time of its sale. The condition of many of these records is poor because of the way in which they were stored. Many records were laminated in the period 1950 - 1970, according to the Barrow Method (only three of the 41 oversized items for 1790 have been laminated; most of the remaining 40 items were laminated). Record books, in order to be treated in this manner, have to be completely disassembled and subsequently rebound. These processes fostered disorder in the arrangement of papers. Papers are not totally legible, and some loss of information can be anticipated. Some pages have suffered from mold growth and discoloration. Previously, some of these records were microfilmed without a frame counter and with little regard to page arrangement. Persons named in the records were not numbered sequentially in the original records; therefore, pages within a district may not be in the original order. The appropriate order is often difficult to determine. Wherever possible, the order presented on this microfilm is the most logical as determined after hours of examination of document content and physical evidence. Index to the Records - The tax records for the period 1785 - 1805, in Wilkes County, have been researched and indexed by Frank Parker Hudson. The information he compiled is published in a volume entitled Wilkes County, Georgia, Tax Records, 1785 - 1805. Mr. Hudson has indexed each taxpayer from every available tax record in this 21-year period, and he tied his index to the original taxpayers by citing the frame number which appears for every tax document on the microfilm. The informational sheets ("targets"), which appear before each tax year, refer to Hudson's Symbol, an alphabetic designation used to identify each militia company - the districts used for taxation. The finding aid gives locations for both original records and microfilm. Please use the microfilm for reference.