Early Life and Education
Nancy Hanks was born the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks in what was then part of Hampshire County, Virginia. Today it is Mineral County, West Virginia. Years later, her son Abraham's law partner William Herndon reported that Abraham told him that Nancy's father was "a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter." In 1863 during the American Civil War, West Virginia, where slavery was limited and many people supported the North, was admitted to the Union as a separate state, having seceded from the Confederate state of Virginia.
Lucy Hanks moved with Nancy to follow her sister Elizabeth Hanks Sparrow and her husband Thomas to Washington County, Kentucky. There she married Thomas' brother Henry Sparrow. Lucy placed her daughter Nancy with Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, who essentially raised the girl. Nancy would have learned the skills and crafts a woman needed on the frontier to cultivate crops, and clothe and feed her family. Hanks became an excellent seamstress, working at that before her marriage.
Read more about this topic: Nancy Lincoln
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