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While disappointingly meager, adequate records exist to trace the basic outlines of the life of the Hanks family patriarch Richmond County native Joseph Hanks (1725-1793)-the father of Lincoln's grandmother Lucey Hanks (c.1766-1793), and the pioneer who brought the family into Kentucky about 1784. Tracing the life, activities, and migrations of this man is central to understanding the experiences and culture that shaped the attitudes, folkways, and shared memories of this family.
Following Joseph Hanks is also central to knowing where his daughter Lucey was at any given time prior to her twenty-first birthday. Until that day, she was legally under his dominion and care. With exceptions that will be noted later, it can be assumed that until the age of 21 she lived where he lived-even after she became a single teen-age parent on the birth of the mother Abraham Lincoln.
It bears noting, however, that one of the later Kentucky documents concerning Lincoln's grandmother was composed in her own hand-a short statement penned April 26, 1790, certifying she agreed freely to marry her husband-to-be, Henry Sparrow. The 42-word autograph, written in a strong hand, proves that Lucey Hanks could read and write. The document was photographed at the Mercer County courthouse during the 1920's, and subsequently published by Barton, but is now said to have been to have been stolen some years ago. From her signature on the certificate, it is known that "Lucey" is how she spelled her name.
Lucey's father Joseph Hanks was born on December 20, 1725, into a poor white family living in a culture dominated by a wealthy, landed aristocracy, tobacco and an oppressive slavery-based economy-an economy in which it was becoming increasingly difficult for small freeholders, tenants and simple craftsmen to subsist. About 1759 he married Ann Lee, whom he called "Nanny". A landless tenant, he probably farmed a few acres and worked for others as opportunities arose. He was appointed by the county on a part-time basis during the 1770's as a road maintenance inspector. In 1781 he was in the joint hire of two neighboring gentlemen-planters, apparently as their overseer. He may have worked for them and other planters in the vicinity prior to that year.
In 1782, he made a tentative sojourn of several months in Hampshire County, Virginia (an entity now divided between four West Virginia counties), on what was then the frontier of settlement. But he returned to his native Richmond County that fall, where he wintred and attempted to settle his accounts-an endeavor that lasted into the spring. By June of 1783, however, he, his wife and children had departed from the Rappahannock country for the last time.
After what seems to have been a few weeks or months of travel, possibly visiting relatives else where in Virginia, he returned to the hill country of Hampshire County during the latter part of 1783 or early in 1784. but very soon, in March of 1784, he mortgaged the Hampshire County farm he had purchased earlier. This is probably when he migrated to Kentucky, although he is not recorded there until February of 1787, when he purchased a farm in Nelson County. On January 8, 1793, at the age of sixty-seven, he made a will and died shortly thereafter. He was survived, according to various sources, by his wife Ann and nine children: Thomas, Joshua, Wiliam, Lucey (Lincoln's grandmother), Elizabeth, Charles, Mary (Polly), Nancy, and Joseph. He never learned to read and write. He is never known to have owned slaves.
Joseph Hanks' 1725 birth in Richmond County was duly recorded by the Anglican church of North Farnham Parish. The depressed economic state of the family is shown by the fact that, when Joseph's father John Hanks died about 1740, Joseph's mother Katherine was required by the county court to show cause why her children should not by bound out by the church wardens. The wardens never got custody of Joseph or the other children, but he could have been bound out just the same, by private arrangement. Like othe fatherless poor white children, he could well have served as an apprentice to someone until the age of 21. He married late-around the age of 33-to Ann Lee (c.1742-d.after 1794), a woman about 16 years his junior. Perhaps he was too poor to marry until then.
Following his marriage Joseph is reported fairly frequently in county records: as a road inspector or "surveyor", as a testifier in a court litigation, and as a witness to deeds and contracts. By 1759 he and Ann were beginning to have children; but the birth of only one of them was recorded in the Anglican parish register , since Joseph and Nanny were most interested, it seems, in the Baptist religion that was beginning to make inroads in the vicinity. One of Joseph's ister married a man whose brother, Thomas Dodson, left Richmond County and became a prominent Baptist layman in Pittsylvania County in southern Virginia.
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