Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/41

Rh in the shop of one Joseph Hanks, in Elizabethtown, and while thus engaged, he became enamored of a niece of his employer by the name of Nancy Hanks.

It would appear that there were four families which had been closely and intimately associated in geographical propinquity in at least two States, if not in three or four, and were also equally associated in marital bonds. They were the Lincolns, Hankses, Berrys, and Shipleys. They probably were all of Quaker proclivities, and among that worthy class there is a spiritual intimacy unknown in other clanships. The Lincolns and Hankses had been neighbors in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The Berrys, Shipleys, Lincolns, and Hankses had owned a common tie of spiritual community in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. One Richard Berry had emigrated from North Carolina to Kentucky in the same party with Abraham Lincoln Sr. They were connected by the fact of both having married sisters of the name of Shipley. A daughter of Richard Berry Sr. had married into the Hanks family in Virginia, the issue being one child, a girl, named Nancy. When the father died the widow, Lucy (Berry) Hanks, migrated with her brothers-in-law to Kentucky, where she married a second time, this husband being one Henry Sparrow, brother to Thomas Sparrow who had espoused her first husband's sister. Prior to this second marriage, the widow and child had found a temporary home with Thomas Sparrow's family, and after the marriage, Nancy, being greatly endeared to her aunt, continued to live there for a time. Dennis Hanks, a cousin, being a child of still another Hanks, was also an