I often like to peruse those census property values. Not only do they tell us who owned property (sometimes this is surprising, such as when it's the wife or mother in law of the "head of household") as well as something about the relative wealth and farm sizes of the householders on the enumeration list, but the "Personal estate" numbers in the 1860 census (and later) may also be clues to the people's lives. I've noticed that mechanics and people who call themselves "merchants" or shopkeepers appear to include their trade tools or shop inventories in their personal estates. And recently when I ventured into 1860 census records for southern plantation owners, I saw some astonishingly large dollar amounts for personal estate -- apparently they were reporting their slaves as wealth, so this entry was an indication of slaveholders.
