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Using Donation Lands in Family History: an Example

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Altha Dowell Dunavion Binkley

The Dowell Family

An Example of Donation Land Information Use

By Desmond Walls Allen

My great-grandmother was Altha Dowell Dunavion Binkley. She was born Oct. 21, 1881, and lived into her 90s, so I knew her well. Unlike some people who don't think to ask their older relatives about family history until it's too late, as a teenager, I asked Grandma Binkley (as I called her), about her family. She knew her mother, Amanda Tucker Dowell, had died in the mid-1880s, leaving three little girls and a husband, John Pinkney Dowell. Grandma told me stories about her great-grandmother, a woman she called Patsy the Witch (that's Patsy above on my web banner). I wrote notes about what she told me. I was hooked on genealogy before I even learned to drive.

Grandma lived in Tuckerman, Jackson County, Arkansas. I asked where she was born, but she didn't know. I asked if it was around Tuckerman, but she said no, it was somewhere else; somewhere "up north," she said. But census records for her listed her birthplace as Arkansas. I found her parents in the 1880 census for Fulton County, Arkansas. She was born up north all right, 'way up in north Arkansas. Since I had the census listing for John and Amanda Dowell in 1880 in Myatt Township in Fulton County, I presumed Grandma was born somewhere around there.

There aren't deed or tax records for Fulton County for the early 1880s. It's another "burned" courthouse. I'm convinced my relatives on all lines burned courthouses for entertainment (and to get rid of arrest warrants). I didn't have a single original record with John Dowell's signature, and only one photo of the man. It's a poor-quality picture and he looks sad.

John Pinkney DowellThen in 1999, I got involved in transcribing the donation land records for all of Arkansas. I was trying to get over a terrible, near-fatal bout with leukemia, and keying those land records helped. I found, since I'm female and can multi-task, I can key records and listen to audiobooks at the same time. I was working away, keying the donation land records and absorbed in a new biography of John Adams, when I suddenly realized I'd keyed the name, "John P. Dowell."

And before my fingers had slowed down, I'd keyed James Dowell's name, too, John's brother. "Can't be," I thought. But it was. And they were in the right general geographic area. I looked at the date of the transaction, 8 March 1881; it was just months before my great-grandmother's birth. If John was filing for donation lands, he had to be close enough to farm the land. I'd found the closest description of their residence I was ever likely to find.

The experience only got better. I made a special request of Dr. John L. Ferguson, Director of the Arkansas History Commission, to pull John Dowell's donation application from the mountains of paper in the unprocessed manuscript collection behind the donation lands. You can see that document below. Some of the applications have entire files, not just a single sheet of paper, but I was tickled with this one page. I got the one for John's brother, too, but his signature is just an "X."

 



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