If Buller Time had a secondary motto, something tacked on after “An occasional blog for the family of Cornelius (Chris) Buller and Malinda Franz,” it would probably be: There is always more to learn.
For example, Aunts Maria and Sarah wrote in the Buller Family Record that, after landing in the U.S. and traveling by train to Nebraska in late June of 1879, Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller “and their six children stayed with the Goertzens for about a week. During this time grandfather [Peter D] bought an 80-acre farm about 1¼ mile west from where Henderson now is.” As we learned back in 2016, Peter D added a second 80 acres to his original purchase via the Homestead Act (see here). In the end, they owned the entire 160 acres of the northeast quarter of section 12 in the Farmers Valley Township of Hamilton County (one section below the upper right corner of the map to the right).
That has been the sum and substance of our knowledge, but there is, of course, always more to learn. So it is that we embark on a blog series to see what more we can learn about Peter D and Sarah’s farm. In the process, we will also learn about the Homestead Act in general and as it relates to our family history. We will also have occasion to learn about a devastating drought in the early 1890s that brought many Nebraska farm families to financial ruin—and wonder what effect it had on Peter D and Sarah and their family.
I cannot say that this will be a linear series moving logically and methodically from point A to point B. Rather, I expect that we will be collecting pieces of information from disparate sources that slowly will help us to assemble a clearer and fuller picture of our topic of interest: Peter D and Sarah’s first farm in their new life in the United States. With the background and goal of the series now set, we begin with the first bit of information from a previously unknown source: tract books.
Every governmental program creates its own demand for record-keeping. The U.S. federal government’s distribution of federally owned land was no exception. Beginning early in the nineteenth century, the General Land Office (predecessor of today’s Bureau of Land Management) carefully recorded each transfer of land from the public domain to some other party (Powell 2024). As Kimberly Powell explains,
Tract books are not indexed by name—instead, they are organized by state and then by the legal land description (numbered range, township, and section). … a typical bound volume holds the records of about twenty townships.… Each township (23,040 acres [i.e., 36 sections x 640 acres]) is documented over twelve pages, with three sections (640 acres per section) on each page.… Each land entry is recorded across two pages.
If you wish to read more about tract books in general, I recommend the Powell piece linked below. For our immediate purposes, actually looking at the pages of a tract book is the most effective way to learn about them (for a larger version of the photo below, see here; you can download that version and make it as large as you want on your computer or other device).
We will look at examples of the writing in a moment. For now we simply need to note that each entry extends across two pages and that the entries are grouped together. What do we need to learn from this? (1) A single line across the two pages contains all the information for a given person’s homestead claim. (2) All the pieces of a single section are grouped together, so we have in the two pages of that grouping all the homestead information for that section of land. What kind of information is supplied?
The left-hand pages first identify the tract by its location within the section, then its section number, township, and range. After that follow the “contents” (the size in acres and 100ths), the rate per acre in dollars and cents, the purchase money in dollars and cents, and the name of the “purchaser.”
Looking closely at the extract above, we see that the parcel is the northeast (NE) quarter of section 10, township 9 (Farmers Valley), range 5 west. The tract is for 160 acres, and the price is given as $2.50 an acre. However, the purchase price that James W. Hunnel paid was only $10.00. Comparison with other entries on the page reveals that the purchase price is generally $10.00 but sometimes only $5.00. Why did James Hunnel not pay $400 (160 acres x $2.50/acre)? Clearly, a book designed to record purchases has been adapted to record land grants. In all likelihood, the land was valued at $2.50 an acre, but the homesteader paid only a $10.00 filing fee.
The right-hand pages record additional information about the transaction. Once again we see that a book designed for land sales has been adapted to record homestead grants.
Right-hand pages begin with a column for the date of sale, followed by the “number of receipt and certificate of purchase.” The columns after that are titled “by whom patented” and “date of patent.” A land patent is the right or title to a particular area of land. Presumably the original book gave space in these columns to list the seller (by whom patented) and when the seller acquired the land (date of patent). The final two columns on right-hand pages are generally left blank
In the example above, the date of the sale is listed as “Aug 26/72,” that is, 26 August 1872. The number in the second column is 11504; this is, if I understand correctly, the application number, that is, the number assigned to the claim when it was first made. Instead of listing the name of the person who was selling the land (by whom patented), column 3 specifies the final disposition of the claim: the final certificate (Ctf), number 9273, was issued on 14 August 1879. From the information on this page we learn that the homesteader, James W. Hunnel, applied for his homestead grant on 26 August 1872 and received final title to the land roughly seven years later, on 14 August 1879. The Homestead Act required homesteaders to live on, farm, and improve the land for five years after an application was made, but clearly not all grants were finalized immediately after the five-year period.
The two pages of this particular tract book contain but a small part of the information that was recorded during the period of the Homestead Act. Each tract-book volume contains, on average, over two hundred two-page spreads like the one we see above, and Nebraska alone has 118 volumes of tract books. Thus the records for Nebraska’s homestead claims are spread across 23,000+ two-page spreads like the one we see above.
Now that we have a sense of what the pages of the tract books contain, we are ready to give attention to our own ancestor’s appearance within these records. In fact, if you look closely at the second image in this post, you may be able to spy an entry for Peter Buller. This is none other than Peter D Buller, and all the information relevant to his and Sarah’s original farm will be the subject of the following post.
Works Cited
Powell, Kimberly. 2024. “Tract Books: An Index to Public Domain Land. Learn Genealogy website. Available online here.
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