Database of Nebraska Homesteading

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

To examine the extent of homesteading fraud more closely, we developed a database using the recently digitized homestead records; this chapter and chapters 6 and 7 report results obtained from this new data. Most previous studies of homesteading have been severely limited because researchers found it difficult to access the physical homestead records. Short of traveling to the National Archives or ordering costly paper copies of individual case files, scholars lacked easy access to the documents, and obtaining paper copies to construct a large database has often not been feasible. As a result scholarship has primarily employed anecdotes or the poor quality homesteading data reported in the General Land Office’s (GLO) annual reports, assembled by severely overworked land office clerks.

We use the digitized homestead records for Nebraska made available through a consortium that is digitizing all the case files of finalized homestead claims that are currently housed in paper form at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Nebraska, the state with the first homestead claim, was also the first to be digitized. The consortium includes NARA, the Homestead National Monument of America, University of Nebraska, Fold3.com (later Ancestry.com), and FamilySearch.com. Fold3.com and Ancestry.com are making these records available (for a subscription fee) to the public for the first time; the University of Nebraska is providing additional metadata for scholarly research on the Nebraska records. We developed a study area of five townships each in Custer County (central Nebraska) and Dawes County (western Nebraska). The bulk of homesteading in the Custer County townships occurred between 1885 and 1904, whereas in Dawes County homesteading occurred mainly between 1890 and 1899, both with their last claims occurring in 1908 (fig. 4.1).

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At the time we began our research in the summer of 2013, the digitization of the main land offices servicing these counties, Broken Bow for Custer County and Chadron for Dawes County, was complete. During our processing, we realized that the Broken Bow office, which was open from 1890 to 1908, and the Chadron office, open from 1887 to 1894, did not in fact process all the records for our counties. The Grand Island office, open from 1869 to 1893, and the Alliance office, open from 1890 to 1908, also served homesteaders in our townships. The Broken Bow office opened in response to regional demand, while the Alliance office eventually replaced the more remotely located Chadron office to serve the sparse western Nebraska population better.

Independent scholar Russell Lang from Craig, Nebraska, meticulously classified all Nebraska townships based on the “methods of land transfers from the public domain to private and governmental entities.” Using his map, we identified five townships each in Custer and Dawes Counties in which the majority of the land was transferred via the Homestead Act. We defined these ten townships as our study area; five in Custer County ... with 324 claims, and five in Dawes County ... with 297 claims.

We created a database of all 621 successful homesteaders in these townships, recording application number and date, name, legal description of land, acreage claimed, gender, country of origin and citizenship application date (if applicable), state of origin (if applicable), age, and other information included in affidavits such as acreage broken, improvements made, and any absences from the land. Our database is thus not a sample but rather a full census of these townships. Where relevant, we also collected information outside the records on claimants’ land transfer, military, and census records. The military and census records are available through Fold3 and Ancestry.com; the land transfer records required us to go to the historical societies for both counties. In addition to collecting demographic data, we mapped the homestead claims. To fully explore the particulars of the homesteaded lands, we tracked down original survey maps for each township and overlaid them with modern geospatial data. We also recorded all four witness names included in each Proof of Posting for every homesteader in order to generate sociolegal networks of the community within each township.