DECATUR - Nancy Hanks Lincoln died 191 years ago, leaving as a legacy her son, Abraham, the man many people view as the greatest U.S. president, as well as a disagreement over her lineage.
Nancy Hanks' antecedents remain controversial; a fire fanned by the sometimes disparaged history of Lincoln published in 1879 by William Herndon, his long-time law partner.
In that work, Herndon said Lincoln revealed to him that "my mother was a bastard." He said Lincoln related that Nancy Hanks was the offspring of a Virginia planter who took advantage of a poor, gullible girl.
Historians believe that girl was Lucinda "Lucy" Hanks, a daughter of Joseph Hanks of Richmond County, Va., who gave birth to Nancy on Feb. 5, 1784.
Tom Hanks, 58, of Decatur is a Lincoln cousin a number of times removed. He believes Herndon's tale of Nancy Hanks' parentage, based primarily on the lack of reaction by Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, to Herndon's assertion.
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"Robert Todd Lincoln never discredited that story," said Hanks, who is an avid genealogist where the Hanks family is concerned. Life in Virginia of the 1780s was "hard, short and violent, and people took what they could get."
Robert Todd Lincoln had retained the right to edit the biography of his father that John Nicolay and John Hay published in 1891, which included the disputed information on Nancy Hanks' parentage, and did not delete that reference, Hanks said.
The Hanks were a poor, illiterate, hardscrabble family on a Virginia plantation where Joseph was overseer, Hanks said. Lucy Hanks eventually married Henry Sparrow but they did not raise Nancy, who was farmed out to other relatives and friends, likely because she was the product of Lucy's fornication, which was considered a grievous sin in the morality of the times, he said.
Nor was Lucy mentioned in Joseph Hanks' will, having been written out of it, Hanks said. The only reference to Nancy in the Hanks family Bible is her date of birth, he said.
"There are too many people who do not want Herndon's story of Lincoln's mother to be true because they feel it blackens Lincoln's name and it destroys their ideas of her lineage," Hanks said.
The Hanks family tree is extremely confusing because each generation had a propensity for naming its children after ancestors, Hanks said. He agrees with historian Paul H. Verduin's lineage of Joseph Hanks' family.
Verduin named Joseph's other children as Thomas, Joshua and William, who was born about 1765, moved to Spencer County, Ind., about 1825, where he was a neighbor of Thomas Lincoln and his son, Abraham, before pushing on to Sangamon County about 1827 and finally Macon County in 1829. William Hanks' children were Nancy, James, William, Charles, John, Sarah, Joseph and Lucinda.
William Hanks settled west of Decatur in what now is the Harristown area and was there in 1830 when Thomas Lincoln brought his family to Macon County from Indiana. Tom Hanks said William and his son, James, are his direct forefathers. Because William was Nancy Hanks' brother, James was her nephew and a first cousin to Abe Lincoln.
"When Lincoln told Herndon that his mother was a bastard, he told him not to reveal that fact while Lincoln was alive," Hanks said. "Lincoln's opponents would have loved to have had that information and would have tried to use it to destroy him. After Lincoln's death, Herndon did tell, and people disbelieved him. But why would he lie? He and Lincoln were law partners for 25 years and close friends. But there really is no way to prove Nancy's lineage."
Nancy Hanks' marriage to Thomas Lincoln in 1806 was a major event in her life because of her background, Hanks said. Marriage gave Nancy an opportunity to have some security, something she had not had while growing up, he said.
Kathy Hantle, 53, of Danvers, Tom Hanks' sister, attended a major re-enactment of that ceremony, staged near Hodgkinville, Ky., in 2006. She estimated between 1,000 and 1,500 people assembled for the event.
Hantle said she was planning on going to Tennessee to visit a brother when she heard of the re-enactment and decided to visit. She filmed the ceremony at the behest of her brother, Tom.
There is another line of thought on Nancy Hanks' ancestry that involves a family named Shipley.
"The Shipley family was putting on the wedding re-enactment," Hantle said. "When they found out I was a Hanks, they turned and walked away. They were not friendly to any Hanks from Illinois. It was over the lineage issue."
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RELATION TO THE ACTOR?
Tom Hanks of Decatur is a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, but another Tom Hanks has won fame and fortune as a movie actor and director.
Decatur's Tom Hanks said they are very distantly related, two cousins in the vast assemblage of Hanks that come off different branches of a family tree that dates back hundreds of years to England, Germany and even ancient Egypt, if some researchers' work was to be believed.
The two Toms are not acquainted.
