Did You Know?
By
Bob King
The Story of the Roe Family: Three Generations of Homesteaders
In recent columns, I have mentioned cases of two generations of homesteaders in the same family. That even happened in my own family. But it made me wonder if there were cases of three generations of homesteaders in the same family (parent, child, and grandchild). Though uncommon, there were indeed such cases!
To follow is the story of the Roe family of Nebraska. It uses records found in Ancestry.com, Find A Grave, Newspaper.com, the Bureau of Land Management’s online database of General Land Office records, and the Homestead casefiles of the three generations of Roe family homesteaders. Their records are in the National Archives and online through Ancestry.com.
1st generation Roe family homesteader: Henry Roe (1834-1908)
Nebraska homesteading for the Roe family began with Henry Roe. He was born June 28, 1834 in County Kilkenny Ireland. In 1850, at age 16, he immigrated to Canada, settling in the province of Ontario. There he married about 1855 to Mary Duke (1835-1862). Of their three children, only their son David Roe (1860-1938) survived to adulthood.
As a young widower, Henry Roe remarried on May 12, 1863 at age 28. His second wife was Mary Ann McCracken (1844-1933), a native of Ontario. Their first five children were born in Canada, but their last two were born in Howard County in central Nebraska, where the family settled in mid-1872.
Like many immigrant families, the Roes were probably drawn to the United States by stories of rich farmland that could be gotten for “free” by homesteading. Soon after arriving, Henry filed for a 160-acre homestead in Howard County, Nebraska, which he received on September 10, 1880. His homestead casefile in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. includes his statement that he first settled on the land on October 1, 1872 and began construction of his 24’ by 26’ pine-frame house the next month. It would include 8 rooms, 11 windows, and 8 doors.
In proving up his homestead claim on October 31, 1879, Henry supplied a copy of his naturalization certificate showing that he had become a citizen of the United States on November 20, 1877. He also told that he dug a well, built a stable and granary, and had “broken” 60 acres of land upon which he had grown wheat, corn, oats, and other crops.
Around the time that Henry Roe established his homestead claim in the fall of 1872, he also acquired rights to two other nearby 160-acre tracts of federal land. One adjoined his homestead. On July 25, 1873, Henry Roe received this adjoining tract of land from the federal government. He was able to get title to it by purchasing scrip issued by the federal government to the State of Virginia under the July 2, 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act.
This law, passed less than two months after the Homestead Act, provided federal land to states and territories for the creation of colleges that would benefit agriculture and mechanical arts. For states like Virginia, with no federal land within their borders, they sold their land vouchers (scrip) to benefit their existing colleges. Private land agents and speculators frequently purchased such “college scrip,” and then resold it to individuals, like Henry Roe, for a profit.
The price paid by Henry Roe for his scrip is unknown, but a guess is around $1.25 per acre. That was the usual price for federal land if Henry Roe had instead just bought directly from the United States government. However, the benefit of buying and using scrip to acquire land was that it could be presented to any United States Land Office and redeemed immediately to establish rights to available land under the jurisdiction of that land office.
Henry Roe also filed a third claim in the 1870s for another 160 acres near his homestead. He did it under the Timber Culture Act of March 3, 1873. Under its original terms, Henry was obligated to plant at least 10 acres in trees, though in 1874 the law was amended to require 40 acres of trees on a 160-acre claim. The 1874 amendment also required the trees to remain living for at least eight years prior to proving up. Henry would keep farming his land in Howard County until his death on February 11, 1908, at age 73, with his widow Mary Ann surviving to age 98 before her death on January 20, 1933. By that time, Henry Roe’s oldest son, David Roe (1860-1938), was already well-established on his own homestead a few miles away.
2nd generation Roe family homesteader: David Roe (1860-1938)
David Roe was born December 17, 1860 in Grey Township in Huron County, Ontario, Canada, a son of Henry and his first wife Mary Duke. David was about 12 years old when he immigrated to Howard County, Nebraska with his father and stepmother and their growing family.
David grew up on his father’s homestead, with unclaimed federal land in the same township where they lived still available for homesteading. As soon as possible, David would claim some of this land – and he did it as a teenager, as the head of a household, thus not needing to wait until he was 21 years old to enter a homestead claim as required by the 1862 Homestead Act.
On August 17, 1880, David married at age 19, in Howard County, Nebraska to Eliza Ella Dodd (1863-1956), then age 17. She had also been born in Ontario, Canada. Her father, James Francis Dodd (1832-1915) immigrated with his family to Howard County in the 1870s, where he homesteaded land adjoining Henry Roe. David Roe filed for a 160-acre homestead located less than 10 miles south of both his father’s and father-in-law’s homesteads.
David’s casefile in the National Archives reported that he first settled on his homestead in September of 1880, the month after he married. He then formally filed for the land at the Grand Island, Nebraska U.S. Land Office on February 24, 1881. His casefile also included a copy of his naturalization certificate. It documented that he gained United States citizenship on February 7, 1890. Unlike his father, who was still a citizen of his birth-country of Ireland when arriving in Nebraska, David was a citizen of Canada for having been born there in 1860.
David Roe reported having built a 16’ by 21’ frame house with 3 rooms, 3 doors, and 3 windows. He also stated that he had constructed a stable, granary, frame cattle shed, and well. Further, he had “broken” around 100 acres of land on which he had raised corn, wheat, oats, barley, and vegetables. He received his homestead on June 5, 1890.
David and his wife Eliza (Dodd) Roe remained on their Howard County Nebraska homestead where they would celebrate over 57 years of marriage prior to David’s death on August 26, 1938. His wife survived until August 9, 1956. They had 13 children with 11 surviving past 1910. Their oldest son was James Henry Roe (1883-1969), and he, too, would become a Nebraska homesteader – the only one of his 12 siblings to homestead and the third generation of the Roe family to homestead.
3rd generation Roe family homesteader: James Henry Roe (1883-1969)
James Henry Roe (1883-1969) was born January 16, 1883 in Howard County, Nebraska.
James never married. In his mid-20s, around 1908, James moved to sparsely settled western Nebraska, taking out a homestead claim in Morrill County. It was hilly, drier part of Nebraska where the 1904 Kinkaid Act allowed homesteads up to 640 acres in size. This was an area where that much land (or more) was needed to make a living at farming and ranching.
On November 4, 1913, James H. Roe received his 634.83-acre homestead in Morrill County, Nebraska. Yet despite receiving his large homestead (nearly a square mile of land), James apparently was interested to acquire even more land in Morrill County, Nebraska.
On June 1, 1916, a notice in The Alliance Herald newspaper of nearby Alliance, Nebraska, which was the location of the U.S. Land Office, told that James H. Roe had applied to purchase certain additional federal land. It was land near his homestead described as an “isolated tract.”
However, instead of just selling the land to him, the Land Office in Alliance offered the tract at public auction on July 18, 1916. The minimum bid allowed was $3 per acre, which, at that time, may have been a relatively high price for the quality of the land involved. James Roe did not acquire the land and might not have even bid on it.
On September 18, 1918, when James registered for the draft in World War I, he listed himself as a “ranch owner.” Apparently, he was never called up to serve in the war that ended less than two months later. Occasionally, James made trips back to Howard County, Nebraska, over 250 miles to the east, to visit family and friends. In his last years, he returned to Howard County, and died there on July 15, 1969 at Dannebrog, Nebraska. He was buried in the Canada Hill Methodist Episcopal Cemetery in Howard County, Nebraska. Near his grave are ones for his homesteading parents, his homesteading grandfather, and other relatives.
Truly, homesteading shaped the lives of the Roe family for many decades over three generations. It would be very interesting to learn from any readers if they know of other cases of three generations -- and possibly even four generations -- of the same family homesteading (as parent, child, grandchild, and even great-grandchild).
If there were such cases of four-generation family homesteaders, my guess is that the fourth generation either homesteaded in Alaska in the mid-to-late 20th century or claimed a post-World War II “Reclamation Act” homestead in the “Lower 48” states. (Readers may recall that I wrote about one such post-World War II “Reclamation Act” homesteader in southern Idaho.)
In all, multigenerational homesteading, as well as homesteading by spouses, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, and other relatives, appears to have occurred often. I have conducted detailed studies of nearly 140 homesteaders in a random sample involving 27 states from the late 1860s to the 1950s. Of those, I have found that at least 31 had relatives who also homesteaded (22%), with 16 of those 31 being parent-child relatives (11%). While the Roe family example is the first 3-generation homesteading family (0.7%) I have studied, I suspect there were others. Whether these percentages for “homesteading relatives” from my small sample would hold up for the estimated 1.6 million total number of homesteaders in the United States is unknown, but they might not be far off and would be worthy of further study.
Today, family connections for most people remain very important for influencing what they do. The same was certainly true in the past including during America’s Homestead Era of the 1860s-1980s. Thus, understanding those relationships may help us better explain why, when, how, and by whom certain areas of the country were homesteaded. The result could be a more complete understanding of how homesteading really happened in the United States.
