Timothy Lincoln Beckwith

Timothy Lincoln Beckwith (born October 14, 1968) is the son of Annemarie Hoffman and claimed by Hoffman to be the son of her husband Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, which would make Beckwith the great-great-grandson, and the only known living descendant, of Abraham Lincoln.

Timothy Lincoln Beckwith was born on October 14, 1968, in Williamsburg, Virginia, to Mrs. Annemarie Hoffman Beckwith and supposedly to Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith. His mother grew up in Hanover, Germany, moved to America and became a student at the College of William and Mary. She married Beckwith in 1967. Six months after the marriage, Beckwith received a letter indicating that his wife was pregnant. However, Robert had had a vasectomy six years before he and Annemarie were wed. He visited his doctor and concluded that he was ‘completely sterile’.

Just before the baby was born, Robert urged his wife to list the baby’s father as unknown on the birth certificate and gave her $7,500 plus the hospital cost. However, when Timothy was born, she listed Robert as the father and gave the child the name Timothy Lincoln Beckwith, after his claimed father. Annemarie then returned to Europe with her son.

Robert filed divorce proceedings, charging his wife with adultery, but they were delayed by a countersuit held by Annemarie. In 1976, the District of Columbia Superior Court ordered Annemarie, who was by then back in the United States, to appear in court with her son, so that Timothy could take blood tests to determine if he was Beckwith's son. Annemarie refused and the Superior Court accordingly ruled her son was the product of an 'adulterous relationship'. However, since Timothy had not actually been proven to not be Beckwith's son, the Court said that the boy retained the right to present a future claim of being a Lincoln descendant, thereby inheriting the Lincoln estate.

Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith died in 1985 and Annemarie moved to West Berlin. By 1994, she was said to have remarried and was living somewhere in the United States. Timothy Lincoln Beckwith currently lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he is an attorney with the Florida State Attorney's Office. According to an article appearing in The New Yorker, upon the death of Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, the beneficiaries of the Lincoln family trust in the absence of an heir — the American Red Cross, Iowa Wesleyan College, and The First Church of Christ, Scientist — agreed that a considerable sum of the money would go to Timothy, in exchange for his surrendering any future claim to the fortune, so as to guarantee their legacy would be free and clear.