Traditionally, women are considered to be the backbone of a society. They are thought of as the homemakers, the caretakers, and the glue that holds a family unit together and hold down the fort while their husbands work and bring home a paycheck to pay for the necessities of life. Throughout history, the role of women in the world has been tightly defined. But not all women were designed to fit into these tight, narrow molds of womanhood. Dora Bridget Holland is one of those women. She was born in Ohio shortly before the start of the Civil War, the seventh of eight children. Her parents, Cornelius and Bridget, were both born in Ireland and arrived in the United States in the 1840s, dreaming of a better future and the chance to have more control over their own lives, even if it meant leaving the country of their birth and the traditions of their forefathers. This determination of Cornelius and Bridget, like thousands of other immigrants, as well as the fact that they choose to carve their own way in the world, would have been observed by their children. Including young Dora.
Dora Bridget has fascinated me since I first saw the photograph of her in my Grandmothers’ collection. She is a woman of striking appearance – not beautiful perhaps, but there is something about her that is captivating. She was also something of a mystery. And as you may have figured out by now, I love a good mystery. I went back to basics to learn as much as I could about Dora. She first appears with her family in the Ohio 1860 Census, at the tender age of two months. By the time Dora is 10; she has lost a younger brother to typhoid and moved with her family to Michigan. By the mid-1880s, Dora is watching her older brothers strike out on their own, going to the Dakota Territory and beginning the homestead patent process. As a woman in the late 1800s, Dora has few choices for her life – society says she should find a husband and have a family. Until then, she would be expected to live with her parents, performing one of a handful of jobs, including teaching. As an Irish Catholic, it was a little surprising to me that she didn’t enter into religious service like her younger sister. The research I did on the Holland family, the more I learned that Dora had a different plan for her life…
I knew that two of Cornelius’s sons went to the Dakota Territory in the early 1890s to claim land that was made available through the Homestead Act of 1862. This act made it possible for industrious individuals – a group made almost exclusively of men – to earn ownership of land through a five-year process. After identifying the section of land they wanted to own, the men would go to the local patent office and file a claim on the land. This declared their intention to live there and make improvements on the land, such as building wells, homes, growing crops, or planting trees. They had, on average, between three and five years to make these improvements, at which time they could return to the patent office and apply for the land to be deeded over to them. Land files are a wonderful, and often underused, source of genealogical tidbits about our family. In any event, which I was searching for the documents regarding James and Daniel’s plots of land, an entry I wasn’t expecting leaped off the screen at me.
It was for Dora B Holland, who would have been about 29 years old on the 23 January of 1890, the day she was granted 160 acres in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory. Newspaper articles would reveal that she sold her land in the spring of 1900 or 1901 for the considerable sum of $450 – about $13,500 in today’s dollars. To give you an idea, this is close to what a full-time federal wage US employee would make in 2017, before taxes and other deductions. At the turn of the century, Dora was single and had a lovely little nest egg for herself. But she’d also sold her land, her home, and she is missing in the 1905 South Dakota and 1910 Federal censuses. She simply vanishes from the records. More than a century would pass before the rest of Dora’s story would be uncovered.
To…. Be… Continued…
