The first post in this series introduced the tool the General Land Office used to record land transfers from the government to private owners: tract books. This post will apply what we learned there to a parcel of particular interest to our family: Peter D and Sarah’s Hamilton County farm a mile west of the south end of Henderson. As mentioned in the previous post, Peter’s name appears on the same page we examined earlier. Peter’s name is the fifth listed in the extract below.
As noted earlier, all the homesteaders for a given section were listed together in a tract book, even if years separated their claims. Although the handwriting is difficult to make out in places, the top row clearly indicates that this grouping is for section 12 in township 9, range 5, which is Farmers Valley Precinct in Hamilton County. All the subsequent rows use hash marks (") to carry the heading down to the end.
After identifying the location of the land, the tract book lists the size of the acreage that the homesteader has claimed. Notice that everyone in the first group of six claimed 80 acres (480 acres total), as do the next three men (240 acres total). Below them are two more entries, each for 160 acres (320 acres total). In other words, this section of the book records claims for 1,040 acres. Since a section of land is only 640 acres, how can this be? The corresponding right-hand page in the tract book explains. (See the first post here for an explanation of the columns on this page.)
Peter D’s row (the fifth row, written in darker ink) is a good point of reference. The wide middle column reads: Final Certificate 402. This tells us that Peter fulfilled all the requirements for homesteading and that a certificate of ownership was issued to him on the date listed in the following column: 3 September 1892. This information helps us to decipher some of the other rows, presented below in a larger size.
Row 1, for example, reads: Final Ctf. No. 6748, which was issued (or so it is claimed) on 12 September 1877. In fact, land grant 6748 (see here) records the date as 24 June 1878. It appears that someone made an error when entering the information into the tract book.
Row 2, by contrast, makes no mention of a final certificate; rather, it states that the homesteader’s claim was “Canceled” on 13 January 1879. Rows 3 and 4 also record the cancellation of the claim. The reason for cancellation is not supplied, leaving readers to wonder whether the homesteader failed to meet the requirements or simply decided not to pursue the claim to the very end.
Whatever the explanation for the canceled claims, we now know why the tract book records for section 12 of Farmers Valley Precinct listed claims totaling 1,040 acres: some original claims were canceled, and others were then made when that land came back on the market, so to speak.
Now that we have solved that minor mystery, we are ready to look more closely at the homestead claims relevant to our family.
The figure above focuses on the first six entries on the left-hand page for section 12 in Farmers Valley. The first thing to notice is that the entries in rows 2–4 are crossed out; that is because these claims were canceled. That does not mean that we can ignore them, only that we know that these claims did not lead to land ownership.
These entries have their own pattern and system of abbreviation that takes a bit to figure out. Each one begins with the word “Home,” then follows with a precise but abbreviated description of the parcel. For example, the top row in the image above has an N with a superscripted 2 next to it, then NE with a superscripted 4 next to it, which means the north half of the northeast quarter (of section 12). If you look down to row 5, Peter D’s row, you will see an S with the superscripted 2 and an NE with a superscripted 4: the south half of the northeast quarter.
Why is this information important? If you recall, the Farmers Valley plat map in the previous post (here) showed that Peter D owned the entire northeast quarter of section 12. Now we know a little of the history of how he acquired that land. The north half of that quarter was homesteaded by someone else and later purchased by Peter D; the south half of that quarter was homestead by Peter D himself. We will come back to that “someone else” and how Peter came to possess the north half of the quarter in a subsequent post.
For now, this page has more secrets to reveal. If you look closely at the three crossed-out entries, you will see that the first one has S\2 NE\4, while the second and third have the same S+2 and NE+4 that we saw with Peter D’s entry. What does this mean? Peter D was the fourth person to make a claim for the south half of the northeast quarter of section 12.
The first person to claim this 80-acre parcel, Abraham Sperling (see the top image in this post), made his claim on 23 January 1878 and canceled it less than a year later, on 13 January 1879 (all information from the right-hand page of the tract book). Sperling was followed by Abraham Martens, who made a claim fifteen days after Sperling’s was canceled, on 28 January 1879; his claim was canceled later that year, on 11 September. Eleven days after that, on 22 September, Gerhard Dück (presumably Dyck) claimed the south half of the northeast quarter; his claim was canceled on 9 August 1880—the very same day that Peter D made his claim for the parcel. In other words, Peter was the fourth, not the first, to claim this land through a Homestead Act grant.
One additional (minor) observation about the filing fee. The top image in this post shows that Abraham Sperling, the first claimant of the parcel, paid a $10.00 filing fee; the three subsequent claimants each paid only $5.00. We cannot draw any firm conclusions from this small data set, but it appears that only the first filer of a claim paid the full $10.00 fee; if that claim was canceled, subsequent claims could be filed with a reduced fee of $5.00.
This seems a good place to conclude this post. To recap, thus far we have discovered that the north half of the northeast quarter of section 12 in Farmers Valley Precinct, which Peter D purchased shortly after arriving in the United States, was homesteaded by someone else. Peter D came to own the south half of that quarter via the Homestead Act, but only after three other homestead claims were canceled between January 1878 and August 1880. We will pick up the story at that point in the next post; we have plenty more to explore in the series about Peter D and Sarah’s farm.
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