A genealogy colleague sent me back these (she wishes to remain anonymous):
Feel free to post additional suggestions. If they are clean, we'll add them. If they are not, well...
This letter was written by Tjark Janssen, my uncle. Fortunately, he mentions Eilt Ufkes, another uncle, Poppe Fooken, another uncle, and Mrs. Jans Janssen, my great-great-grandmother. So I know right away that the article was written before her death in October of 1913. The article mentions her travelling to Colorado for her health. Jan Janssen was a brother to Tjark Janssen, who wrote the letter.
All without being able to read English. I know John could easily read German, so literacy wasn't a problem. And there is also a very good chance that others in his neighborhood here in the United States could read English if he needed it and there probably was at least one local lawyer, bank clerk, etc. who could speak and read German.
But it makes the point. Even if your ancestors were literate, what documents did they sign that they could not read? And what if they had no one nearby to help them translate?
Just a little food for thought.
And a reminder that when John naturalized in the 1870s, there was no language requirement. Just stating a fact--we try to avoid getting political here. Although readers of the newspaper clipping will note that it indicates John indicates he was a Republican, but does not express himself against Woodrow Wilson or the present administration. Maybe John was just a little bit of a politician, like two of his grandsons.
Doing this is more than a simple exercise. Fully analyzing this information requires me to put it into a complete chronology of John's life. Two other dates are crucial here--John's immigration in March of 1869 and his marriage in Hancock County, Illinois, on 3 March 1874. John is known to have been in Adams and Hancock Counties in Illinois shortly after his arrival in the United States (staying with family).
Based upon the dates in his homestead file, John should be in Illinois in the 1870 census. To date, despite numerous searches, he has not been located in that record. Based upon the homestead application, he was in Nebraska on 4 September 1872, but how long he had been there and how long he stayed after that date is debatable. On 20 Nov 1873, Briggs claims John had abandonded his homestead--probably indicating John had been away from it for some time, perhaps all of 1873.
Family tradition was that John thought Nebraska was "too wild" and not a place to raise a family. His sister and her husband moved to Franklin County, Nebraska, shortly after the 1880 census. John returned to Hancock County, Illinois, where he married and remained for the remainder of his life (except for a few years when he farmed near Golden, Adams County, Illinois).
red circle is where you can filter by location. 
choose disappears. If you do not see anything, scroll up to the top of the webpage, that is what I had to do.
Bamply did not located the desired entry. I performed a keyword search instead for the word "laurels" only because I remembered that word was in his biography (this has to be on the top of the list of minutia that I have remembered). Any way I did find his biography split over two pages, which is how it was in the original.
Had I not already had the dates of death and copies of the obituaries, this would have been a really nice way of locating them. Obituaries for three of their children turned up as results on my search.
The cards were microfilmed by state and alphabetically within a state. It is not necessary to know any registration districts to search the microfilm--just the state.
I'll have to give it a try on some of my brick walls. Unfortunately two of them were probably in Missouri in 1870, so I won't get too creative on searching for them until Missouri is added to the list of searchable states.
I'm not certain this is a Kile from my wife's family, but this is a screen shot from FamilySearch's new 1816-1838 Ohio Tax Records.This database that was recently added to the Familysearch site. It is located in the United States, Canada, Mexico section. I'll be waiting for it to be complete.