Property, People, and Progress along Frontiers: How Land Policy Affects Selection and Outcomes

The goal of this project is to evaluate the process of land title allocation, inclusive of how it influences who seeks what land, and its effects on economic outcomes for people and places. It will look at how Homesteading, a massive land redistribution policy in the U.S. beginning in 1862, contributed to economic development and upward mobility for the families of homesteaders. Many citizens sought land, but over 40 percent of homesteaders did not succeed in securing title. How does the lack of securing the property affect them? The question is important on its own as  as 30 percent of the U.S. populations are descendants of homesteaders. But it also informs current land reform around the globe as to how the policy will shape individual outcomes.

The cheif challenge to conducting this research is that many of the records are now digitized, but not indexed or linked to one another and many of them are handwritten from the 19th century. Working in coordination with the renowned Record Linking lab at Brigham Young University, the project will deploy machine learning techniques (Computer Visioning, Natural Language Processing, and advanced linking algorithms) to build an expansive data set linking land entrants to land patents and to individual census records and family trees from 1880 to 1940.