I’m plowing very slowly through copies of fifty letters from the Staack-Ehmen collection at the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln, Nebraska. As I went through the set of images to make certain I had received all the ones I had requested, I came to appreciate the work that goes into cataloging a set of […]

In May of 1879, Ostfriesen immigrant William Ehmen was in Nebraska. Desiring to bring fellow Ostfriesens to Nebraska to settle, he wrote a letter of inquiry to A. D. Buckworth with questions regarding homestead settlement. Ehmen inquires about four townships that fell under the jurisdiction of the land office in North Platte, Nebraska. The letter […]

In “Bounty Land Warrants Go to Heirs Not Debtors in 1859,” I mentioned a newspaper article from 1859 that discussed briefly that bounty land warrants were to be treated as personal property in estate settlements and what the process was for obtaining a patent to federal property if the warrantee had died before the warrant […]

An earlier post mentioned searching newspapers for references to ancestral associates. While searching for information on man to whom a relative assigned a warrant, I came across the following newspaper item from 1859: [from the St. Albans (Vermont) Messenger 12 May 1859] 1) That the bounty land warrants issued by the United States are declared by the act of […]

[reposted from 2014] This 1852 era military bounty land warrant was issued to James Kile for his service in an Ohio unit in the War of 1812. The illustrations serve political purposes and probably were included to make the warrants more difficult to reproduce and forge. That’s also probably why the blue ink was used […]

In an ongoing effort to learn a little more about the 78th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, I’ve been searching for the unit on GenealogyBank among other sites. And I ran across this little gem in the Springfield, Illinois, Daily Illinois State Journal from 10 June 1865. The 78th was in the eastern United States at the end of the War. […]

We are excited to again offer our 5-week session on United States land records in May 2018. Land records can shed a fair amount of light on your genealogical research–as long as they are understood and thoroughly researched.  Learn more about these records, how to research them, and how to analyze and interpret them. Michael […]