If I don’t know someone’s address, can I find his or her details in a valuation roll?

Not very easily. Firstly, the person must be the head of the household (as far as the Assessor is concerned): either the owner or tenant of the property. Secondly, the roll is arranged by the address of the property. The indexed digital records will be helpful for those years that are currently available, but for the unindexed original records you would have to search through randomly occurring surnames (i.e. the surnames are not in alphabetical order). Thirdly, the only distinguishing information between people with the same name is their occupation and it is easy to confuse individuals: it may not be possible to tell the difference between a father and son with the same occupation. It may therefore take about an hour or two to work through the roll for a small community – a village or small town. For larger towns and cities, it would require several days to search through the whole roll.