Since two of the three authors teach history at the college level, this book is what you might call a scholarly work. It is still accessible for the casual historian, and very informative if your ancestor was actually a homesteader. While they focus their deepest analysis on Nebraska, they look at data from other plains states as well. They state early in the book that while the general public has a positive view of homesteading, historians have had a negative view, due to some previously published information that these authors think was misinterpreted and exaggerated. This book is their effort to set the record straight.
The “facts” that these authors aimed to disprove were that homesteading was a small part of farm formation; that most homesteaders did not “prove up” their claims; that there was a lot of fraud and corruption in the process; and that homesteading caused Native Americans to be dispossessed of their lands. They examine the same figures that earlier historians used, but do a more accurate job of analyzing it, and they have access to newly digitized data. Part of the data is for the entire country, but they do a deep dive into data for homesteaders in two Nebraska counties, Custer & Dawes. I won’t tell you exactly what their conclusions were, but suffice it to say that sometimes the general public has a pretty good idea of what is going on!
The way the authors analyzed some of the data was interesting to me as a genealogist. First, they took all of the digitized data for the two study counties, and put it in a database. One of the things they did with this data was to map the exact location. They did this using ARCGIS mapping software, which does not seem to have a free version, but there are other mapping software products out there, if you want to do this for your homesteader. In order to prove up their claims, each homesteader had to name four potential witnesses that would swear that they had stayed on the land and made improvements, and two of these witnesses had to go to the land office and testify. The authors used software called Gephi to map these connections, which historians apparently call network theory, and genealogists would call a FAN club. Again, there is probably other free software out there, but this is an interesting way to look at a neighborhood.
If this was your family, how would you research them? This book was published in 2017, and the data had just been completely digitized for Nebraska. While they mention Fold3, it appears that this information is now available on Ancestry.com. If you go to the Search screen, and scroll down to the Land Records link under the Tax, Criminal, Land & Will category, then in the Featured Data Collections box click the View All in Card Catalog button, scroll until you find “U.S., Homestead Records, 1863-1908”. The URL is https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/60593/. You will have several different ways to search within these records. It looks like they have completed digitization for ten states. You can see the entire digitized record for your homesteader.