If your landowning ancestor signs a mortgage for their farm to someone that's clearly not a bank or lending institution, determine if they had any relationship to that individual who held the mortgage. It could be they borrowed money from an in-law, step-parent, cousin or other family member. Not all loans that involve individual people (and not banks or lending companies) are between relatives, but it's worth checking out the possibility of a relationship.
And the mortgage won't indicate if the mortgagor and the mortgagee are related.
Individuals or merchants in a community often loaned money to small farmers for the next year's crop. Banks were not plentiful as they are today and if there had been a bank, most wouldn't have qualified for a loan. The persons involved didn't have to be kinfolks, but were usually neighbors.
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