The Homestead Act and Me

Last week, driving home from my brother’s wedding, my family and I stopped at Homestead National Monument of America.[fn1] We didn’t really know what to expect. We only planned on staying for an hour or so, because Nebraska falls halfway into the 21-hour drive from Utah to Chicago, the drive that we needed to do in two days so that we’d be back before our kids had to start school.

We got to Homestead when it opened. And we ended up staying for more than three hours. Because Homestead is amazing; it celebrates the Homestead Act of 1862, which ultimately distributed about 10 percent of U.S. land to successful homesteaders.

What was the Homestead Act? Basically, it was a law that allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of land. If the settler built a home on the land, lived on it, made improvements, and farmed it for five years, the settler would receive a patent for the land, signed by the current president, that meant the land was his or hers. And the “his or hers” is deliberate; land was available broadly to men, women, recent immigrants, even African Americans who had been freed from slavery.[fn2]

(Of course, the government wasn’t giving away empty land, and the National Monument does an excellent job giving voice to the Native Americans whose land was taken to give to these men, women, immigrants, and African Americans.)

So where’s the Mormon connection to Homestead National Monument of America? I actually wondered that while I was there. The Monument says that there are an estimated 93 million descendants of homesteaders alive today; I assumed that I wasn’t one of them. After all, I didn’t know of any of my ancestors who had homesteaded.[fn3] the Act wasn’t passed until 1862; Mormons had made it to Utah in the late 1840s. My quick phone search at the Monument indicated that the Utah territory had made a mess of divvying up federal lands, between giving them out before they were surveyed and driving the first federal surveyor out of Utah in 1857. Still, 7 percent of Utah’s land was given out to homesteaders. Did that include any of my ancestors?

To figure it out, I looked in FamilySearch for ancestors who would have lived in Utah at roughly the right time (say, 1870s to 1910s). I then searched for those names in BLM General Land Office Records site.[fn4]

And it turns out that at least four of my ancestors got land under the Homestead Act.[fn5]

Sondra Sanders. Sanders was my great-great-great grandfather. He received his patent for 160 acres in Salt Lake County on December 1, 1874.

James Fackrell. Fackrell was another great-great-great grandfather. He received his patent for 80 acres in Weber County on March 30, 1881.

A couple things about this one: first, 160 acres was the minimum size of a homestead, but a number of my ancestors seem to have homesteaded something less than 160 acres. I’m not sure if that was just to deal with the chaos of Utah land transfers, or if it was something else.

Second, 11 years earlier, Fackrell had purchased 80 acres in Davis County.

Christian Pedersen. Pedersen was my great-great grandfather. He received a patent for 80 acres (again!) in Cache County on March 24, 1887.

Charles A. Brunson. Brunson was another great-great grandfather. He received a patent for 160 acres in Millard County on October 28, 1915. That’s just about a decade before my grandfather was born. Which is crazy to me.[fn6]

So there you have it: Mormonism, family history, and the Homestead Act of 1862. Anyone else among the 93 million Americans descended from homesteaders (whether in Utah or elsewhere)?

[fn1] The National Monument is on the site of the Daniel Freeman’s homestead. Freeman was one of the first people to claim a homestead under the Act.

[fn2] That’s not to say the law was entirely progressive and colorblind. To qualify for land under the Homestead Act, an would-be settler had to be a citizen or have filed a declaration of intention to become a citizen. But not everybody qualified for citizenship, at least during the first eight decades of the law. People of Chinese decent didn’t become eligible for U.S. citizenship until the end of 1943, and would thus have been ineligible to homestead and get land. For Indians, it didn’t happen until 1946. And for Japanese individuals? 1952.

[fn3] Which maybe isn’t saying much—I didn’t know a ton about my 19th-century ancestors.

[fn4] Note that the site isn’t limited to land received under the Homestead Act of 1862; when you click on the person, though, you can determine how that person acquired the land.

[fn5] I say “at least” because I didn’t do a comprehensive search, so I may have missed somebody.

[fn6] Though it shouldn’t be—the Homestead Act remained in effect until 1976, and applied to Alaska for another 10 years, even though homesteading largely stopped in the mid-1930s.