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Richmond County, Virginia (203 squ. mi., pop. 7,000) is still a rural and rather remote part of the Tideewater region of Virginia. It is nowhere near the bustlin capital of the Old Dominion that goes by the same name, but lies about 60 miles east of Fredericksburg as one travels down the historic Northern Neck of Virginia toward the Chesapeake Bay and Yorktown. The broad, tidal Rappahannock River (2-3 miles wide) forms its southern boundary. Richmond County is one of the six Tidwater counties that, together with Westmoreland, Lancaster, Northumberland, King George, and Stafford, form the Northern Neck-the long, narrow estuarine peninsula sandwiched between the tidal Potomic River on the north, and the Rappahannock on the south. The Northern Neck is the birthplace of Washington, Richard Henry Lee, James Madison, James Monroe, and Robert E. Lee. During the late eighteenth century half of its population were slaves.
The honor of discovering that Richmond County was long the home of Lincoln's mother's forebears, the Hanks family, belongs to the Rev. William E. Barton (1861-1930), who wrote extensively about Lincoln during the 1920's. There have been a few detractors to Barton's identification of the Hanks family with Richmond County-mostly persons who could not accept the idea that the Great Emancipator's mother was illegitimate, and who therefore had to construe other origins for her. Yet, in 1865, John Hanks, Lincoln's companion during his early Illinois days, told Herndon:
My father...[was] born in old Virginia in what is called the Rappahannock River. Abraham's [i.e., Lincoln's] mother was my first cousin. Abraham's grandmother [i.e., Lucey Hanks] was my father's sister.
While Barton was the first to link Lincoln's grandmother and the Hankses to Richmond County, and was the first to publish and evaluate some of the records they left there, his research effort was surprisingly superficial. The method he used seems to have been as follows: he wrote to the county cler, asking him to send certified copies of any documents in the court's deed books, will books, order books, etc. concerning the Hanks family. The Richmond Clerk during the lat 1920, E. Carter Delano, consulted the indexes for these books and obviously labored mightily to send him hand transcribed copies of the lengthy documents involved. Delano even attempted to piece together the genealogy of the clan for Barton, as is evidenced in explanatory note in the appendix of Barton's 1929 work, Lineage of Lincoln. However, he didn't get beyond the inexed material.
Barton used the same methodology in his research on the Hankses in Hampshire and Mineral Counties in West Virginia, and in his attempts to find members of the clan in various federal archives and the State Archives of Virginia. As far as Barton's research-by-proxy in Richmond County is concerned, anything not indexed, and some things that wer, he missed. He missed a lot
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