If you think you have ancestors who came to Oregon or Washington on the Oregon Trail, there are websites you can check to see if their names are listed. You may discover their name in the Early Oregonian Personal Profile archive. If your initial search doesn't get a hit, try using just their name and the county where they lived. I find that filling in the year slot can cause a miss.
Another great online database for finding your early Oregonian pioneers are the Donation Land Claim records, created and maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. You don't have to know the legal description of their land claim - just their name and the state where they claimed land.
Oregon is not the only state that gave away public lands to people who would farm and develop it. See if you can find your ancestors in land records in Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and other states that were once on the frontier.
When I started my search for my Oregon Trail ancestors, I had to drive to the BLM office in Portland to get answers. That was a couple of decades ago. Now I can find and print their records from my own living room.
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