The link below has land patents and is accessible by the public. A land patent is the first recorded ownership of a parcel of land. It will include surveyor's description of the parcel, when purchased or homesteaded, the land office where the patent was first recorded, the date of purchase, and by what instrument it was purchased. The purchcase method are mostly cash and warrants. Soldiers in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and the Mexican War were issued warrants good for land patents. The majority of the receipitents of these warrants used those to aquire land for themselves. However, these warrants could be sold to others, sometimes as low as 10 cents to the dollar. In this case, I'm not sure how it got recorded when a someone used a purchased warrant to aquire land. A land patent is valuable for documenting exactly where an ancestor's land holdings were located. BLM GLO (Bureau of Land Management - Government Land Office) Several states also have public genealogy web sites. The Illinois site also has duplicate of land patents in Illinois. For example, brouse the Illinois site below to see what sort of information is available. http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/ A third source of information is the Government Military listings. Use Google to uncover these URLs with search words such as "Civil War", "Military pension", "World War 1", etc. Here is a link that might be useful: BLM GLO Records - Home

As liriodendron said, you may uncover some family secrets when you research your lineage. That's the best part, it's the things they didn't want known that are the most interesting! In my case my father said that there was a secret in his family but he never knew what it was, his mother did but she was gone. Well that's all I had to hear and I was off to the races, I had to find out! What did they deam so bad they didn't want anyone to know??? So I started digging, looking for any clues. I searched a couple generations and found nothing. But the generation prior I found something unusual for this very WASPish clan. Amidst all the Scottish/Irish names I see a woman with a very different maiden name...mediterranian maybe. Was this it? The big secret was that there was an Italian in the family tree??? LOL. I laughed because that would be something this family thought to be shameful (btw, my mother was Italian). It took some doing but I finally tracked down the mystery woman's lineage and that's when I saw it...siblings with Jewish names! That was all it turned out to be, my snobby grandmother who bragged about being a Daughter of the American Revolution was technically speaking, Jewish. I called my father up laughing, "hey Dad, you're technially Jewish! That's your mother's secret". He said, "that's it? that's all?". Here I was looking for a mass murderer and it turned out just to be bigoted grandmother. OY! But wait...there's more. ;-) Years before I got into geneology I was talking to a Jewish gal who says to me, "you're Jewish right?" I said no. "Yes you are" she replies. "no" I repeat. I remember this conversation because of what she said next, "You ARE, you just don't know it!". We laughed. I wish I still knew her because she would have gotten such a kick out of my geneology discovery. Even though I'm only 5% Jewish she could tell it's in there somewhere!

I have a World Deluxe membership to Ancestry.com. I can access anything and everything they have. Additionally, I am a contributor to the site (keying in records that will eventually be online), and I'm also an arbitrator for the Ancestry.com web site. Before new records are released online, they are keyed in by two different people. The two sets of keyed records are then given to an arbitrator, who can see the original digital imgage, and who then compares the data. If the two folks who keyed the stuff enter different information, it's the arbitrator who decides which is correct (or can enter completely new info if both keyers got it wrong). Also, once information is available online, if a member sees something that's wrong (or might be) they can suggest a correction. For example, let's say you're looking at a Census image that lists your ancestors. The enumerators (the folks who went door to door collecting the information) were notorious for misspelling names -- they weren't necessarily familiar with a lot of the foreign names and/or didn't understand the foreign accents, etc. Let's say you have an acestor named Celia, but on the Census page it's written (and transcribed) as Sialia. So, you click on the link to make a correction. Or, you see the name Amelia but it's been transcribed as Amella. When you look at the digital image you can tell that the dot over the "i" is sort of connected to the bottom part of the "i" so it's a simple transcription error. You click on the link to make a correction. The information that you enter is reviewed by an arbitrator, who decides whether or not the info you enter will be viewable by everyone who has access to the records.

Edna Gladney was just one of many entrepreneurs operating throughout the US, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century. The Cradle was a similar operation near Chicago. They were 'alternatives' to state and religious charities, an option for people who often failed to meet social workers' qualifications -- too old, unstable, dubious histories, etc. An adequate financial situation was qualification enough at these alternative operations. They even created an aura of being superior. *Their* babies were 'special'. (They did attract people who would pay more.) Gladney and Cradle still exist, but they had to change after the advent of birth control -- and subsequent difficulty in finding the desired product: Healthy white babies. A greater social acceptance of white pregnancy outside of marriage also limited supply. (Am I shocking you? You didn't know about the business side of adoption, with Demand, Supply, and Profit?) There are no Payments. Goodness, that would be *illegal* -- even given the remote chance it became known under the sealed records system. Instead, there were and are upfront and lifelong contributions to these 'charities'. Supporters also housed pregnant girls -- cutting down on Overhead. Pregnant girls worked as nannies and maids. (In the late 1960's a friend of mine was on her hands and knees scrubbing her benefactor's kitchen floor when she went into labor.) There were simpler, cruder operations in less affluent areas: "Baby Farms", where pregnant women were 'sheltered'. When they gave birth they were presented with bills for room, board, delivery, and nursery care. If a woman had had financial support, she wouldn't have been there in the first place, so... she signed the surrender and the baby was actually *sold* -- no pretense of 'a charity'. Should the infant be un-marketable (not white, infirm, whatever) , it was sent to the state home. Local judges facilitated these adoptions. (The legal system has long opposed unsealing adoption records.) I don't know if it still exists, but Easter House in Chicago was still using this bait and take as recently as 1990. They found frightened pregnant girls through ads in newspapers and at schools. Respondents were brought to Chicago and isolated in small apartments, escorted to clinics, their hospital bills paid. Once a healthy infant was born and the agency had the surrender, the girl got a bus ticket home. Today families are more likely to view the unplanned child for who it IS, a member of the family. "Shame" no longer has the same unworthy power to break a family apart. And...childless people can now have a child made-to-order in a petri dish -- as though sperm and ova were merely 'donor products', not resulting in their sons and daughters.