Homestead claims index gains support

In 1884, an unmarried woman named Sallie Rankin filed a homestead claim at the Broken Bow land office.

She filed the claim for 160 acres of land near Anselmo in Custer County. Seven years later, at age 30, Rankin receive a patent on her claim, meaning she had built a home and outbuildings and made other improvements to the land mandated by the federal government.

Of all the homesteaders to file claims at the Broken Bow land office, Rankin was the first to receive a patent, or “prove up.”

Katherine Walter, the co-director of the Center for Digital Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, finds Rankin’s story remarkable.

It’s also a story that easily could have been lost.

The nation’s homestead records �” 30 million documents that show who filed homestead claims, where they were filed and whether the claimant ever proved up �” are housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The documents are fragile, and the way they are organized makes them difficult to search. Researchers and genealogists need to know the name of the land office where the claim they’re looking for was filed, for example, and the documents aren’t searchable by the name of the claimant.

Plus, the collection of homestead documents is so large that no one person could ever sort through them all.

But a new program announced last week by UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman will help change that.

UNL has partnered with Homestead National Monument of America, the U.S. National Archives, a nonprofit called FamilySearch and a Web site called Footnote.com to scan, digitize and index the homestead records.

Perlman and others involved in the project hope the result will be a searchable database that will help genealogists trace their family histories and researchers learn new information about the way the U.S. was settled.

The records from the Broken Bow land office, which were transferred to microfilm in 2006 and which volunteers have spent the past 18 months indexing, are already online, at http://cdrh.unl.edu/

homestead. For now, only the records from the Broken Bow office are online.

It was through indexing those Sandhills land records that Walter learned of Sallie Rankin. About 200 other women also proved up claims filed at the Broken Bow office, something it would have been nearly impossible to learn without an easily searchable, well-indexed system, Walter said.

Users can search the Web site by last name, county where the claim was filed, gender of the claimant and country where the claimant was born, among other search criteria.

As difficult as the records are to search at the National Archives, they still are among the more popular documents.

at the agency, with several thousand people viewing them each year, said James Hastings, director of access programs at the National Archives.

And they do contain a lot of information, said Mark Engler, superintendent of Homestead National Monument of America.

Homestead documents show where and when settlers filed their claims, as well as information on births and deaths in that settler’s family. They show what sorts of crops were raised, what buildings were erected on the land, what furnishings filled the house and, ultimately, whether the settlers ever “proved up” and gained legal ownership of the land.

“It’s very, very rich,” Engler said of the information.

Hastings said that once the project is completed, he expects the records will be viewed by millions of people each year, instead of thousands.

It will be some time before all the land records are online.

Volunteers with FamilySearch, a non-profit genealogical research organization run and funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will scan and index the remaining documents, beginning with the homestead records for the Nebraska City and Lincoln land offices.

Footnote.com, an online collection of historical documents, will host the database.

Those wishing to access the documents can pay for a monthly or annual subscription to Footnote.com, or visit Homestead National Monument of America, four miles west of Beatrice; FamilySearch’s Family History Centers or the National Archives, where access to the database will be free to the public.

Nearly a third of the U.S. population is descended from homesteaders, Engler said.

He hopes the new program helps people realize that.

“I think many people will be surprised to find out that they are part of the homestead story.”