♂Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809 – 15 April 1865) was the sixteenth President of the United States. He was a seventh cousin, three times removed, of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through the Gilman family of Hingham, in Norfolk, England: his fifth great-grandmother Bridget Gilman was a sister of Edward Gilman (1587–1655), Nancy’s eighth great-grandfather.

Life

Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809 at Buffalo, in Hardin (now LaRue) County, Kentucky, the son of Thomas Lincoln (1778–1851) and Nancy Hanks (1784–1818). He married Mary Todd at Springfield, Illinois, on 4 November 1842. He died at Washington on 15 April 1865 and was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery at Springfield.

Notes

The link to the Gilman family

The steps from Lincoln back to his fourth great-grandfather Samuel Lincoln follow The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln (Lea and Hutchinson, 1909). Some of its dates differ from later accounts: it gives his grandfather Abraham’s birth as 1739 where others give 1744, and his father’s as 1780, against the 1778 that his age at death implies. His grandmother Bathsheba’s surname, Herring, rests on that book alone, and his mother Nancy Hanks’s parentage is disputed.

Samuel’s father, Edward Lincoln of Hingham, and Edward’s wife Bridget are documented. The baptism of their son Thomas at Hardingham, Norfolk, on 27 November 1601 names both parents, and Thomas’s will calls Samuel “my brother”. That Bridget was also Samuel’s mother is probable but not proven. The Hingham register, where Samuel was baptized on 24 August 1622, names fathers only, and no second wife of Edward Lincoln is known; a 1935 study judged it “reasonably certain” on that ground.

Bridget’s place in the Gilman family is well supported. Her grandfather Robert James’s will names his son-in-law Edward Gilman and his granddaughter “Bridget Lincoln wife of Edward Lincoln”, and in Massachusetts her son Thomas called Edward Gilman his “uncle” in a gift of land.