The will of Abraham Lincoln is dated in Springfield, Chester County, Pennsylvania, April 15, 1745, and was entered for probate on the 29th of the same month. His estate, a plantation in Springfield and two houses in Philadelphia, was divided among his children, viz.: Mordecai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, John, Sarah, and Rebecca. Four of his sons bore the same Old Testament names as the four sons of the first Mordecai of Scituate.
Returning to Mordecai, we find in his will, proved June 7, 1736, that he is described as of Amity, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania. By it he bequeaths to “my sons Mordecai and Thomas all my lands in Amity,” etc.; to his daughters Hannah and Mary a piece of land in Machaponix, New Jersey; and to “my son John three hundred acres of land in the same town;” and to his daughters Ann and Sarah one hundred acres, also lying in Machaponix, New Jersey.
His oldest son, John, was by his first wife, Hannah Salter, and went with his father to Pennsylvania. A deed from John, on file in the Secretary of State’s office in Trenton, New Jersey, describes him as the “son and heir of Mordecai Lincoln, of the town of Carnaervon, County of Lancaster,” and the deed conveys to William Dye “three hundred acres in Middlesex County, New Jersey, part of the property conveyed October 20, 1720, by Richard Salter to Mordecai Lincoln, and by him bequeathed to his said son John.”
John Lincoln, in 1758, owned a farm in Union township, adjoining Exeter (Pennsylvania?), which he sold, and went to Virginia, settling in that portion of Augusta County which was organized into Rockingham County in 1779. His will cannot now be found, part of the papers in the probate office at Harrisonburgh having been destroyed by fire. But there is ample proof that he had sons—John, Thomas, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and daughters.
The son Abraham married Mary Shepley in North Carolina, just over the Virginia boundary line, where their sons Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas were born. In 1782, or about that time, the family removed to Kentucky, where their daughters Mary and Nancy were born. The son Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks, September 23, 1806, near Springfield, Kentucky, and Abraham Lincoln, their son, was born on the twelfth day of February, 1809.
Mr. Shackford continues: “The Lincolns through which the President’s genealogy is traced were for six generations, with a single exception, pioneers in the settlement of new countries. I. Samuel, an early settler at Hingham, Massachusetts. II. Mordecai, of Scituate, who lived and died near where he was born. III. Mordecai, settled in Pennsylvania, thirty years before Berks County was organized. IV. John, went to the wilds of Virginia. V. Abraham, went to Kentucky with Boone when it was infested by savages. VI. Thomas, with his son Abraham, pioneers to Indiana.”
Mr. Shackford has traced the pedigrees of other members of the Lincoln family, in which the persistence of Scripture names is very marked. We content ourselves with the following, which bears directly on the connection of the Pennsylvania and Virginia families:
“Abraham, the posthumous son of Mordecai and Mary Lincoln of Amity, born in 1736, married Ann Boone, a cousin of Daniel, the Kentucky pioneer. Their grandson, David J. Lincoln of Birdsboro’, Pennsylvania, informs me that his father James, who died in 1860, at the age of ninety-four, and his uncle Thomas, who died in 1864, told him that Daniel Boone often visited his friends in Pennsylvania, and always spent part of his time with his cousin Ann, and that his glowing accounts of the South and West induced John Lincoln to remove to Virginia. After his removal he was known as ‘Virginia John,’ to distinguish him from others of the same name.”
A fact which will probably impress the reader is that among the numerous Lincolns mentioned in the six generations from Samuel, the immigrant in 1637, to Abraham, the President, two centuries later, there is not one that does not bear a scriptural name. A coincidence not less remarkable is the identity of names in the successive families.
Among the children of the first Mordecai, 1686, were Mordecai, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah.