A map of Delta County, Colorado in 1884, cartographer Louis Nell, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries
There are so many databases and digitized documents available on the internet that it is easy for today’s family historians to take them for granted. According to Ancestry.com, which currently provides “billions” of images and indexed entries online, their specialists add an average of two million records per day. As of the end of 2024, the Find a Grave website offered over 250 million memorials.
Gone are the days that we have to travel to town offices to page through record books, to cemeteries to wander among the gravestones, and to archives to scroll through rolls of microfilm in order to research our ancestors.
“Moving beyond internet-based research is required if we want to uncover a deeper story rich in details about the lives of those who came before us.”
But even though significant in-person or person-to-person effort is no longer necessary to gather a sizable collection of facts, moving beyond internet-based research is required if we want to uncover a deeper story rich in details about the lives of those who came before us. The volume of information available on the web is large, but it only scratches the surface of the world to be explored.
After all, digitization is an ongoing process, and there are untold numbers of useful documents that still exist in hard copy only. I continue to marvel at what I am able to learn by taking the extra step of contacting a county clerk to request a copy of a will that is stored on their shelf, or by visiting a library to read a handwritten letter that is folded inside one of its boxes. I made a recent exciting breakthrough in my own family history research by writing to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for a copy of the land entry case file of my great-great-grandfather William Jeffrey Gaunt (1852–1924).
Earlier, I found a biographical sketch published by one of his children that said that William migrated with his family from Michigan in the 1880s and “took up a homestead” on Ash Mesa in Delta County, Colorado. This lies in the west-central region of the state, on the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains. To investigate further, I began with the easy step of searching the internet. The General Land Office Records Automation website, hosted by the Bureau of Land Management, contains scanned images of land patents and survey maps that can be accessed quickly (and for free) by entering a location and landholder’s name in the search fields.
The one-page patent listing the bare-bone facts about William Gaunt’s land in Delta County, Colorado.
From this I learned that, in 1891, William was granted 156-plus acres of “Ute Series” land that he purchased in Delta County. The patent lists the coordinates of his tract:
The North East quarter of the South East quarter of Section twenty-four in Township fifty-one North of Range Eleven West and the North West quarter of the South East quarter, the Lot numbered three and the North East quarter of the South West quarter of Section nineteen in Township fifty-one North of Range ten West of New Mexico Meridian in Colorado, containing one hundred and fifty-six acres and forty-nine hundredths of an acre.
The document also names the land as the homeland of the Ute people, which inspired me to study them further. I found that these Native Americans were removed from Colorado to the Utah Territory in 1880, and that 6 million acres of their ancestral land was opened to public settlement two years later. Learning this history reinforced my commitment to balancing the telling of my family’s history with a recording of the supreme loss to others that it involves.
Apart from making me aware of the Ute removal, the patent merely told me how much land William purchased and where it was located. It told me nothing about what his homestead was like. For this, I needed to request his land entry case file from NARA. It took two months to receive it and a $50 fee, but they copied and emailed me the 31-page legal document that William filed in 1888 to claim the land. In it, he and two witnesses detailed his residency, cultivation efforts, and compliance with entry requirements necessary to take ownership. It provided a treasure trove of information that brought the whole event to life.
According to the application, William paid $195.61, or $1.25 per acre, for 156.49 acres. (This is the equivalent of $6,344.64 in today’s dollars.)
The homestead stood outside the limits of an incorporated town, and William described the land as “red mesa soil, most valuable for farming,” and requiring irrigation. There were no minerals, there was “no timber except shade trees I have set out,” and the land was not used for grazing.
William said that he first made settlement on 18 February 1886 and began living there permanently with his wife and child about one week later. This was Catherine “Katie” Annie Brooks (1861–1890) and their first daughter, Sadie Muriel Gaunt (1881–1951).
The land had previously been occupied by a man named Leonard Lawrence, William said, and he purchased Lawrence’s cabin and possessions. The structure was not quite finished, requiring William to complete it. “I fixed up the old cabin, put on a new roof & fenced 2 acres for garden,” he said. Their home was habitable at all seasons of the year.
One page from William Gaunt’s 31-page land entry case file.
In a full description of the house, improvements, and value of each, William listed:
Log house 1 story, 12x14 ft, roof of boards & tar paper, good board floor, good door, 1 window, $50. Board hen house 10x12, $25. Log ice house 10x12, $25. Water closet, $15. About 2 miles of cedar posts & barbed wire fence, $300. $528 stock in Delta Chief Ditch for irrigating the land. Total $953. Strawberries, raspberries, & other small fruit set out.
His farm implements consisted of a “riding plow, walking plow, cultivator, corn planter, harrow & small tools.” For domestic animals and livestock, he had “2 mares, 1 horse, 1 colt, 1 cow, 1 heifer, 2 hogs.” The articles of furniture in his residence were a “bureau, sewing machine, bed & bedding, cook stove & cooking utensils, dishes, table, 6 chairs, rocking chair, commode, etc.”
This humble inventory of what William possessed to create a life for himself and his family lends color to the bare facts of his progress over time. I can imagine him using his tools and livestock on the land and retiring to his home with Katie and their daughter after hours of physical labor, as he accomplished the following:
In 1886, William put in a 2-acre garden, and he paid $100 in taxes in Delta for the improvements he made on the land.
In 1887, he planted 8 acres of alfalfa and 1 acre of potatoes in addition to the garden, and his taxes doubled to $200, presumably based on the increased value of his property and its yield.
In 1888, he had 72 acres in crop.
William reported that he and his family had lived continuously on the homestead except for two occasions, one in which he worked as a mason in town, and one in which he farmed on a neighbor’s land:
In 1886, working on court house at Delta. In 1887, I worked James Kerrs land for a share of the crop and I lived on his land for about 11 months, but at the same time I worked my own land also. I was not able to get seed for my own land nor feed for my team. Mr. Kerr furnished both & I worked his land.
All of this from William’s case file!
I knew from previous research that his second daughter, my great-grandmother Theresa Barbara Gaunt (1889–1949), was born on Ash Mesa not long after the family arrived in Colorado. Though she died before I was born, now I could picture her first home. I also knew that her mother, Katie, died very young, when Theresa was just one year and seven months old. I could now begin to imagine what the short life of this pioneer woman was like.
Although I greatly appreciate the wealth of online information available to me in my genealogy research, it feels fitting that I came to this new knowledge about my ancestors by writing to a government office for hard-copy documents filed by my great-great-grandfather. William built a farm with modest equipment and resources, and I am building the story of that place with the help of back-to-basics legwork in my research. I hope that comparing the stark information from the patent to the vivid description in the case file convinces readers to venture beyond the online world, as well. Who knows what you might learn!
Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.