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:
“I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“Next to our free political institutions, our free public-school system ranks as the greatest achievement of democratic life in America ...”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)