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Joseph Hanks and his family also turned their backs on Virginia and many generations of family history when, in 1784 or shortly thereafter, they migrated to Kentucky along with thousands of other hopeful pioneers. Their activities beyond the Alleghenies are not the subject of this article. Their recorded activities in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois have been examined by many, although not always thoroughly or objectively.
The reader should be informed, however, that on April 5, 1785, Joseph Hanks, now probably a Kentucky pioneer, was finally awarded compensation by the Richmond County, Virginia, court for the four-year-old, 29-pound debt owed him by his former planter-employers, Fauntleroy and Beale. The case had finally been brought before the court by someone to whom Joseph had granted power-of-attorney concerning his Richmond County affairs. The two neighboring planters, one of them (Beale) a court justice, had to squeamishly admit they could not "gainsay" Hanks' court action-they admitted to owing the debt jointly. The court also allowed five pounds for damages and costs, as well as interest charges. Perhaps Joseph put the money, if he ever received it, toward the price of a 150-acre Kentucky farm he purchased in 1787.
Lucey Hanks, now an adult, appears in the court records of Mercer County, Kentucky (then still a part of Virginia) in 1789, when she was indicted, then dismissed on the charge of fornication. Immediately thereafter, she married Henry Sparrow, a Revolutionary War veteran from southern Virginia. They were reported to have had about seven children. Lucey lived in what became Boyle County the rest of her life. She died sometime after the 1820 U.S. census was taken-probably about 1826, a little before her widowed husband remarried. It is not known whether young Abraham Lincoln ever met her; but for more than a year Lucey's younger sister Elizabeth (Hanks) Sparrow (1771-1818) was the boy Lincoln's neighbor in southern Indiana. Most significantly, during the year following 21-year-old Abraham Lincoln's arrival in Illinois, he was a neighbor-in Macon County-of Lucey's older brother William Hanks (1765-1851/2), who certainly would have known the circumstances surrounding Lincoln's mother's out-of-wedlock birth. Lincoln's mother Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln died in Indiana in 1818, and Lincoln's father died in Illinois in 1851.
It seems safe to conclude that Henry Sparrow would not have his wife Lucey's bastard daughter Nancy under his roof. The rejection of a wife's previous illegitimate offspring was a problem not uncommon during those times. Instead, Lincoln's mother passes her childhood under the care of various guardians and relatives. She grew up poor and illiterate. In 1806, she married Thomas Lincoln-a man not favored by fortune, who ultimately had little to count for success. But her son Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809, believed, according to William Herndon, that if nothing else, she had conveyed to him the qualities of her Virginia noblemen father.
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