Oklahoma Allotment Records Online

      Land records from 1899 to 1907 for citizens of the Five Civilized Tribes were just uploaded onto Family Search's website--for free viewing. Did you get that? FREE! Fold3, an Ancestry-owned site, has had this database--but for paid subscribers only. 

https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1390101?collectionNameFilter=false

      The Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory were: Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw.

      Citizens of these tribes who were (1) then living in Indian Territory and (2) whose membership had been approved by the Dawes Commission were allotted land previously held in common by each tribe. Natives had the option of improving their property or selling to land-hungry settlers moving into northeast Oklahoma.

      When people learned to capture that black ooze puddling on their land, millionaires were created. Construction boomed, tent "cities" housed immigrants from other states eager for work and the chance to buy land. Non-Native residents pushed for greater economic control. Demands were made for statehood. President Teddy Roosevelt signed the docs making Oklahoma a state in November of 1907. 

     The only family I've found on this database descend from my mother's first cousin--twice removed. Thomas Jefferson Coffee, great-grandson of Irish immigrant, Ambrose Coffee, was born in Missouri. He married Louella Christian in 1888. She had Dawes Enrollment No. 3046, and Tom was "adopted" into Louella's Chickasaw tribe by marriage. They raised their family in Marshall County along the Texas/Oklahoma border. See Louella's documents at the link below.  Click the arrow on the upper left of that page to scroll the many documents within Louella's folder or to resize the images. Pretty nifty, eh?

https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-61B9-G87?i=1093&wc=MXHP-M38%3A967441201%2C967570901%3Fcc%3D1390101

(Again, forgive my clunky URLs as I know NOT how to make them short and sweetly clickable)

      My Coffee cousins might be interested in seeing two grainy pages of Tom Coffee's actual Application for Enrollment into the Chickasaw Nation in December 1902. As a reminder, Tom was a first cousin to our John Willis Coffee. See both pages:    


      Did you see in what town he was living in 1902? Aunt Helen would have gotten a kick out of seeing that. Hmmm, her dad once lived near there as his own father had a shop in Kingston, Oklahoma. Nancy has a photo of him riding a bicycle on the street near his dad's store. Could John W. have had a fondness for the town of Helen, for whatever reason, and this played into his or Dorothy's decision to name their youngest daughter Helen? 

-- Source:  Oklahoma Applications for Allotment, Five Civilized Tribes, 1899-1907.  Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 17 October 2016. National Archives and Records Administration, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas