I’ve seen hundreds of these affidavits in US homestead records.
This is one of time when there was a clue. It indicated the homesteader on this 1888 document was a widower. That’s a clue. The homestead records don’t indicate that he married her a few years earlier in Illinois and that she and an infant child died shortly over a year later.
I’m a big fan of looking at and actually reading everything. Clues can be anywhere and sometimes something that someone else will not think is a clue will be a clue to you–it all depends upon what is already known.
Genealogy Tip of the Day is sponsored by GenealogyBank. Check out their current offer for new subscribers.
3 Responses
I had to enlarge print to read the circled part but definitely would be helpful information.
And in my Grandfathers, I found he started his naturalization in South Dakota and finished in Colorado. Questioning my Father led to more verbal stories.
In my farmormorfar (great-grand grandfather) naturalization papers, where they ask you to disavow your former citizenship, he began to write “the Czar of Ru….” Then crossed it out, and wrote “the King of Sweden”. The family came from Swedish Finland (or Finnish Sweden, I’d you prefer), which had gone back and forth under the control of Sweden & Russia, before it formally because a country.