Genealogy Jottings

This week I ordered from the National Archives my 8th land entry file for one of our direct ancestors.  Our family really liked that free or cheap land! In fact, great-aunt Signe told me that her parents and grandparents left Norway in the early 20th century because they could get free land in “Amerika”. They homesteaded in Montana, and Tony’s Norwegian family homesteaded in North Dakota, perhaps for the same reason. The 1893 file for his great-grandfather, Hans Jorgensen, is the one I ordered this week. I still have a couple to go for another of Tony’s great-grandparents, and I will order those when I do other research on that line. Often these files contain naturalization information that is otherwise hard to find. The files themselves are easy enough to locate these days. The Bureau of Land Management website has the lists of land patentees with all the pertinent information needed to order the files from the National Archives.

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