County, Kentucky. This fact is of importance, proving as it does that Thomas Lincoln was not the altogether shiftless man he has been pictured. Certainly he must have been above the grade of the ordinary country boy, to have had the energy and ambition to learn a trade and secure a farm through his own efforts by the time he was twenty-five. He was illiterate, never doing more "in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name." Nevertheless, he had the reputation in the country of being good-natured and obliging, and possessing what his neighbors called "good strong horse-sense." Although he was a "very quiet sort of a man," he was known to be determined in his opinions, and quite competent to defend his rights by force if they were too flagrantly violated. He was a moral man, and, in the crude way of the pioneer, religious.

In 1806 Thomas Lincoln married. The early history of his wife, Nancy Hanks, has been until recently obscured by contradictory traditions. The compilation of the genealogy of the Hanks family in America, which has been completed by Mrs. Caroline Hanks Hitchcock, though not yet printed, has fortunately cleared up the mystery of her birth. According to the records which Mrs. Hitchcock has gathered and a brief summary of which she has published in a valuable little volume called "Nancy Hanks," the family to which Thomas Lincoln's wife belonged first came to this country in 1699 and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

This early settler, Benjamin Hanks, had eleven children, one of whom, William, went to Virginia, settling near the mouth of the Rappahannock river. William Hanks had five sons, four of whom, about the middle of the eighteenth century, moved to Amelia County, Virginia, where, according to old deeds unearthed by Mrs. Hitchcock, they owned nearly a thousand acres of land. Joseph Hanks, the youngest of these sons, married Nancy Shipley. This Miss Shipley was

a daughter of Robert and Rachel Shipley of Lurenburg County, Virginia, and a sister of Mary Shipley, who married Abraham Lincoln of Rockingham County, and who was the mother of Thomas Lincoln.

About 1789 Joseph Hanks and a large number of his relatives in Amelia County moved into Kentucky, where he settled near what is now Elizabethtown. He remained here until his death in 1793. Joseph Hanks's will may still be seen in the county records of Bardstown. He leaves to each of his sons a horse, to each of his daughters a "heifer yearling," though these bequests, as well as the "whole estate" of one hundred and fifty acres of land was to be the property of his wife during her life, when it was to be divided equally among all the children.

Soon after Joseph Hanks's death his wife died and the family was scattered. The youngest of the eight children left fatherless and motherless by the death of Joseph Hanks and his wife was a little girl called Nancy. She was but nine years old at the time and a home was found for her with her aunt, Lucy Shipley, wife of Richard Berry, who had a farm in Washington county, near Springfield. Nancy had a large number of relatives near there, all of whom had come from Virginia with her father. The little girl grew up into a sweet-tempered and beautiful woman whom tradition paints not only as the center of all the country merry-making but as a famous spinner and housewife.

It was probably at the house of Richard Berry that Thomas Lincoln met Nancy Hanks, for he doubtless spent more or less time nearby with his oldest brother, Mordecai Lincoln, who was a resident of Washington County and a friend and neighbor of the Berry's. He may have seen her, too, at the home of her brother, Joseph Hanks, in Elizabethtown. This Joseph Hanks was a carpenter and had inherited the old home of the family and it was with him that

Drawn for this biography by J. McCann Davis, aided by surviving inhabitants of New Salem. Dr. John Allen, who lived across the road from Berry & Lincoln's store, attended Ann Rutledge in her last illness. None of the buildings are in existence to-day.

WA.CLARY'S

GROGERY

PETERSBURG

RUTLEDGE
AND
CAMERON

MILL DAI

NGAMON

RIVER