On the topic of yoeman vs. farmer on occupation lists.  The words are both still
used (albeit not with frequency) in the UK.  An 1890 English encyclopedia
defines yeomen as the first class below gentleman.  The modern Oxford English
Dictionary (concise) defines them thus:

Yeoman:  Hist: man holding and cultivating small landed estate of an annual
value (i.e. taxable value) of forty shillings a year and thereby qualified to
serve on juries.

A farmer is anyone who tills the soil as an occupation.  A yeoman by the above
definition owns the land he tills.  Even in modern Britain a vast number of
farmers lease rather than own their land - certainly a situation that was yet
more common in earlier times.  Hence the legal and social distinction.  It seems
sensible to presume that the meaning of the words were retained by English
settlers in their colonies, and that they passed into the general use with the
same meanings in post revolutionary times - but remained in common parlance only
so only as long as the distinction was meaninful in real terms.  Given the rapid
expansion west and the concommitant homesteading, the idea of farmers who didn't
own their land was probably relegated to the sharecropping system - which I
don't think existed outside the south.  (Though I could be wrong on that.)

Beverly Martin