Both parties agree that the grandfather of the President was also named Abraham; that he came from Rockingham County, Va., to Kentucky; that his father, John, came to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania; and that these ancestors were Quakers, or non-combatants. Grandfather Abraham bought 400 acres in Kentucky, and on his Land Warrant in 1780, and also in the Surveyor’s Certificate in 1785, the name is spelled “Linkhorn” in each instance.
The first named biographers claim that John’s father was Mordecai,who came from Hingham, Mass., to Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1725. His father was Samuel Lincoln, who emigrated from England in 1635, and settled in the above named New England town. The descendants of this family spread over New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. The German name “Linkhorn” is brushed aside as the blunder of a clerk.
The argument for a German ancestry does not go so far back in genealogy, and bases itself more on geography and spelling. It so happens that Berks County and Rockingham County were solid German settlements. In the Pennsylvania county the German dialect is still in general use, and the “Reading Adler,” a German newspaper established in 1796, was issued until 1913, still being one of the few journalistic centenarians in the country. When Washington, as a young man, was surveying Rockingham County, “he was attended by a great concourse of people, who followed him through the woods and would speak none but German.” Many of these settlers were non-combatants, that is, Quakers or Mennonites.
That the name “Linkhorn” in the two documents mentioned is not a mistake is shown by the fact that in the Surveyor’s Certificate is the signature, “Abraham Linkhorn.” And what is even more puzzling and curious, the two witnesses sign as “Josiah Lincoln” and “Hananiah Lincoln.” A search of Virginia records from 1766 to 1776 shows that Clayton Abraham Linkhorn was the youngest officer in the militia, and his name, appearing on many different pages, is always spelled in that manner. On the census lists and tax lists in Pennsylvania the names Benjamin, John, Michael, and Jacob Linkhorn appear, and Nicolay and Hay state that in Tennessee and Kentucky the family name is also thus spelled.
This divergence of opinion is not confined to historians, but has even innoculated the Lincoln family. Some years ago David J. Lincoln, of Birdsboro, Berks Co., Pa., published a pedigree of the Lincoln family. This was at once challenged by Geo. Lincoln, of Hingham, Mass., who published a wholly different pedigree.
The evidence in favor of Lincoln’s German descent cannot be waved aside as the error of a clerk. The purchaser of a strip of land would not expose his title to future legal complications without insisting on a correction of his name, whereas five years and two months elapsed between the issue of the landoffice warrant and the surveyor’s certificate, in which the alleged error is distinctly duplicated. Again the name “Linkhorn” appears under the name of two witnesses spelling their names “Lincoln,” conclusive proof that the distinction was a conscious performance and not an accident. A reasonable conclusion would be that other members of the family had begun to spell their name “Lincoln” instead of “Linkhorn,” probably following popular use in a community predominantly of English ancestry, as is the caseof so many names in the German counties of Pennsylvania.When Koester is anglicised into Custer, Hauk into Hawke, Reyer into Royer, Greims into Grimes and Brauer into Brower, as evidenced by many tombstones of long-dead ancestors, it is a most plausible inference that the same process evolved “Lincoln” from “Linkhorn.”
Land Warrant No. 3334, Issued to Abraham Linkhorn, 1780. The Original in Possession of Colonel R. T. Durrett, Louisville, Ky.
Surveyor’s Certificate Issued to Abraham Linkhorn, 1785, from Record Book “B,” Page 60, in the Office of Jefferson County, Ky.