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
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)