Lincoln's Ancestry

THE LINCOLN PIONEERING GENE: LINCOLN’S ANCESTORS

Wanderlust tickled the feet of Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors. In the early 1630s, the prospect of adventure enticed them to leave Hingham, England, about 100 miles northeast of London, and sail for the New World. Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Lincoln line meandered from Massachusetts through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and into Kentucky. Abraham’s family continued its peregrinations in the 19th Century through Indiana and Illinois; in the 20th Century, his descendants circled back East, to light in Georgia, Washington, DC, New York City, Vermont, and again in Virginia, where the line died out in 1985 with the 10th generation.

The first of Lincoln’s ancestors to set foot in North America was Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, England, a teenager apprenticed to the weaver Francis Lawes of nearby Norwich, who emigrated in 1637 with family and business to Salem in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Within weeks, young Samuel was drawn to New Hingham Plantation (Hingham today) where two of his older brothers, Thomas and Daniel, had already settled, having crossed the fierce Western Ocean (as the Atlantic was called) in 1633.

Young Samuel settled into New Hingham Plantation and eventually met and married a young woman named Martha (probably Lyford). Martha bore Samuel eleven children, of whom four sons and four daughters reached maturity.

The fifth of these children, Mordecai Lincoln, was born to Samuel and Martha in 1658. Across Hingham Bay in Hull, Mordecai trained as a blacksmith under Abraham Jones, where he met and married Jones’ daughter Sarah. She bore him two sons, Mordecai (1686) and Abraham (1688), the latter named after Sarah’s father. This was the first Abraham in the Lincoln family.

Restless and ambitious, Mordecai ached to be his own man, and in 1691, he built a dam with a saw mill on Bound Brook in Cohasset. Soon he expanded upstream and built a second dam to run a grist mill, followed shortly by a third dam to run a forge. With Bound Brook’s seasonally erratic flow of water, Mordecai became famous for his ingenious use of the dams to store and channel water to provide a continuous flow for his operations. With the forge, he became one of our country’s first ironmasters - one who actually made iron for domestic and industrial use - processing abundant bog iron from nearby Pembroke. Much of the ironware found in hinges and other items in historic houses in this area was likely produced by his hand.

Sarah’s death late in the 1690s left Mordecai with four children between fourteen and five years of age. He remarried to the widow Mary Chapin of Braintree, and built a house for her in Scituate, then part of Hingham. Mary began to bear children just after the turn of the new century, adding two more children to Mordecai’s family. (Lincolns still abound in the Hingham area today, descended from those of Mordecai’s children who stayed in Massachusetts.)

With the advent of young half-siblings, Sarah’s two eldest, Mordecai the younger and Abraham, fledged their wings and headed for new territory. The brothers landed in Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, where they established a forge in their father’s tradition. Shortly thereafter, Mordecai married Hannah, daughter of the well-to-do Richard Saltar of Buckhorn Manor from whom he and Abraham leased land for their industry. They eventually purchased land from Saltar in several transactions over the years. Hannah bore Mordecai six children, one daughter of which died in 1720 at age three.

Again, Mordecai grew restless. The business had not thrived as their father’s had in Massachusetts Bay. Keeping his hand in at the Freehold forge, Mordecai partnered in 1722 with two other ironmasters, building a new forge in Pennsylvania on French Creek near its junction with the Schuylkill River in today’s Phoenixville. Within three years of this new venture, however, Mordecai sold his interest and returned to Freehold for a time. Hannah died in 1727; Mordecai remarried quickly, as was common in that day, his second wife Mary (Robeson?) assuming the maternal duties to Mordecai’s first five children and soon bequeathing three more sons to her husband. In 1730, he pulled up stakes once again and headed deeper into Schuylkill country. In 1733 in Oley, Berks County, he built for his family a house that still stands, five miles from Reading. His neighbors there included the families of George Boone and Squire Boone, into which several of his children married. Daniel Boone of frontier fame was Squire Boone’s son.

Mordecai’s fortunes fared well enough that he eventually acquired at least two slaves to help him with his work. But he did not enjoy the long life of his father and grandfather who lived into their seventies - late in 1735, only 49 years old, he died. He had accumulated a significant estate, however, and his will bequeathed his New Jersey holdings to Hannah’s children, and his Pennsylvania holdings to Mary’s children.

John, the eldest child of Mordecai and Hannah, had the family wanderlust. He had no interest in the New Jersey lands he had inherited, nor was the bloodtie to his New Jersey and Pennsylvania kin strong enough to hold him. In 1743, John married Rebecca (Flowers) Morris, a widow with one son, who eventually bore him five sons and four daughters. In 1746, he bought land in Berks County; in 1748, he sold his New Jersey property. He lived with his family in Caernarvon Township (Ephrata today), Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; his neighbors were the Ephrata Cloister, a settlement of Seventh-Day Baptists. Self-described as a weaver, John left nothing behind in records or memory of his weaving business to mark his passage. He showed keen aptitude for real estate, however, and profited quickly in land transactions. Land values in Schuylkill country boomed during the middle of the 18th Century as industry, agriculture, and mining prospered.

About this time, only 13 miles southwest of Ephrata, the Conestoga wagon was developed to meet the growing needs of transporting goods to distant markets. A busy road of commerce over which ox teams hauled these sturdy freight trucks wended its way from the Canadian border, tramped through Lancaster, passed along the Shenandoah River, and down into North Carolina. In the wake of these wagons, the prospect of industry in a new frontier drew John’s eye to Virginia, tickling his feet with a familiar restlessness.

Eventually he gave in to the appeal of the South, and in June of 1768, John and his family moved to Linville Creek, an existing estate of 600 acres just outside of today’s city of Harrisonburg, Rockingham County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. It didn’t take John long to establish the Lincolns as prominent citizens of the region, and to prosper. Although John's house was eventually destroyed, his son James built one nearby which still stands, in the middle of active grain fields, with a small family cemetery full of Lincolns for company.

Abraham, John’s eldest child, born in 1744 while the family still resided in Caenarvon, was 24 when John uprooted the family and moved to Virginia. Two years later in 1770, Abraham applied for a marriage license and wedded Bathsheba Herring, daughter of an affluent family of Rockingham County. The Herring family swore to disown Bathsheba if she married this plain man who had little to offer by way of means. With true romance, she flipped her skirts defiantly at her family and chose young Abraham anyway.

Abraham soon acquired adequate means, through hard work and gifts from his father, and would have been highly prosperous had he remained on the rich Harrisonburg land. But he had also inherited the Lincoln love of the frontier. By then, his former neighbor and playmate Daniel Boone had made a name for himself breaking the trail of the Wilderness Road west through the mountains. The wondrous stories that Boone told about the “Kaintuck,” a sacred Cherokee hunting ground, sang a siren song that Abraham could not resist. He made trips to Kentucky in 1780 and 1781, purchased land there along the Green River in what is today Jefferson County, staked it out, and began clearing. Having trained with the local Virginia militia, he had experience in fighting Indians, so his venture into the wilds was not innocent of the dangers and hardships. In 1782, he packed Bathsheba, his four children - Mordecai, Josiah, Mary, and Thomas - and his goods through the Cumberland Gap, never to be seen again by the Valley folk.

When father John died in November of 1788, only a fraction of his estate remained for his children, because he had already given much of it to them as they needed it. He provided for Rebecca’s welfare, and willed certain sums of money to his children. Five shillings were willed to the eldest, Abraham, who had disappeared into the Kentucky wilderness six years before. Abraham never received his five shillings for, unknown to his Virginia family, he had been killed two years earlier by an Indian while clearing his claim.

Within the stockade walls of Hughes Station, Abraham had grown impatient for Indian raids to stop so that he could proceed with his settlement. He had taken his sons Mordecai, age fourteen, Josiah, age twelve, and Thomas, age eight, out to his holdings, where they stumped and grubbed the land that he had surveyed. The story has it that a single Indian shot Abraham from the woods, killing him. Mordecai and Josiah bolted for the stockade, outrunning little Thomas, and the Indian caught Thomas. Josiah fetched a rifle from the stockade and shot dead the Indian who was carrying Thomas off as a hostage. Had the Indian been successful, young Thomas likely would have been adopted into the tribe, and none of his offspring would have had a chance at the highest seat in the land - President of the United States.

Abraham’s widow Bathsheba was left with five children (another daughter had been born since 1782), but the neighboring pioneers reached out to help her. She moved about forty miles south into today’s Washington County, where she lived out the rest of her days among other Virginia pioneer friends. Captain Hananiah Lincoln, a cousin of Abraham and a prominent citizen, also lived there, providing a male role model for Bathsheba’s boys.

Her son Thomas was never known for his education - indeed, his son the President believed that his father was illiterate - but living among people of some means and of some education, even in the wilderness, the boy and his siblings likely engaged in some formal education. Nevertheless, Thomas clearly was not inspired by literacy. His mother died in 1793, seven years after his father was killed, and Thomas, about fifteen, went to Tennessee to live with his uncle Isaac Lincoln, who had settled on the Wautauga River. Isaac did well for himself: by the time his widow died in 1834, the estate boasted two plantations and forty-two slaves.

Thomas returned to Kentucky in 1797. He moved in with oldest brother Mordecai, who had sold the 400 acres on which their father had been killed and used the money to buy 300 acres called Beech Fork near the new town of Springfield, Kentucky. In 1800, Thomas apprenticed himself to Joseph Hanks, a carpenter and cabinetmaker of Elizabethtown, 35 miles west of Mordecai’s farm. By all accounts, Thomas became proficient in this trade, producing work of impeccable quality. By 1803, he had earned enough money to purchase 238 acres of land about twelve miles north of Elizabethtown, on Mill Creek near his two now-married sisters.

Within three years, Thomas had saved enough to afford a wife, and he arranged to marry Nancy Hanks, a ward of Mordecai’s neighbor Richard Berry back at Beech Fork. So it was that on June 12, 1806, at the Berry homestead called Beechland, Thomas and Nancy were wed, future parents of a President.