Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/49

Rh grated to Augusta County in Virginia with John Lincoln, the great-grandfather of the President. In 1711, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, John Hank married one Sarah Evans and they had a son born the next year, who was living as late as 1730, as his father mentions him in his will that year. The Friends' (Quakers') record in Baltimore, still extant, mentions one John Hanke as living in Rockingham County, Virginia, probably the same who emigrated from Berks County, and in 1787 Hannah, a daughter of John Hanke, married one Asa Lupton. The only significant fact about this information is that the Lincolns and Hankses were alike Quakers and neighbors, and if this Hanke was the progenitor of Nancy Hanks, it is a coincidence that the ancestors of both should have been close neighbors, and that a century or more afterwards two members of the same families should have united their destinies with such mighty results.

The only basis in my view to avouch this John Hanke as being the progenitor of the President's mother is that the Kentucky Hankses came from Virginia, and the rarity of the name, superadded to the further fact of the Hankses' and Lincolns' intimacy, and the quite seeming probability that they might seek the same new home. Thomas. Lincoln was a second cousin of his wife, as I show; possibly the families also had in another branch several generations of neighborhood intimacy.

It has been assumed by biographers generally that immediately upon his marriage Thomas Lincoln brought his bride to Hardin County, and that in that county all three of their children were born. The President himself, in his brief