Apparently staking a claim on a site qualifies you to sleep in the ruler's home.
I created a new human adventurer, laid claim to the hamlet she started out in, retired her, created a new adventurer in the same hamlet and went looking for her.
Couldn't find her in any of the normal houses, so I went over to the mead hall and there she was together with the current lord. For some reason she hated me and immediately spat at me when I tried to talk to her. A random trader, also a human, I had come across in town before finding her also hated me.
Anyway, I tried asking her to become a hearthperson, which she refused. Repeatedly stating that her claim over the site was terrific didn't help.
Then I snuck up on the lord and beheaded him. When I then went up to the retired adventurer, she accused me of being a murderer. She immediately made me a hearthperson when I now asked her, though.
Previous claims in a different world never quite worked out. After killing the lord and becoming ruler, a new ruler got appointed and replaced me as soon as I started walking around in fast travel a bit. I did get one hamlet exploding into violence, though. First, I killed the lord and a few of his replacements. Then I retired, repeatedly advanced time in the calendar (made a second adventurer for this), then went back into the hamlet and bragged about the kills, upon which some people started pulling out weapons and attacking me and some others went for my aid.
In that particular hamlet, I managed to recruit a few people as hearthpersons. They still called me a murderer and spat at me, though.
Bottomline, at the moment it's often rather hard to tell which reactions are due to site claims and which are based off of other things (like randomly murdering people) and even when it's clear, the priorities are often a bit weird.
And now I wonder whether you can mod spit to be extremely hot or otherwise potentially lethal.
Edit: I'm guessing the fact the lady hated me from the moment I talked to her was due to the fact I spawned as a regular human of the hamlet, which I guess automatically puts me on the side of the current ruler by default. It seems there's currently no option to join an ongoing insurrection. But I guess killing the lord yourself and then asking to be made a hearthperson kind of works as a stop-gap for now.