WikiTree shows this connection between me and Abraham Lincoln, and at first things look good. I recognize the names through Samual Workman (#5), and was able to establish pretty quickly that he had a son named Isaac, that Isaac married Mary Porter, that Mary’s father was Henry, and so forth. All of the other connections check out as well. Abraham Lincoln is indeed the 1st cousin 1x removed of the husband of the great-aunt of the wife of my 1st cousin 3x removed.
Here’s another way WikiTree diagrams this. The only problem is that down is up. The generations go up as the chart moves down. The arrows between the boxes help but they’re a little hard to see. One interesting observation is that my 2nd great-grandfather James Workman is the generational peer of Samuel Workman, Henry Porter, and Abraham Lincoln. I’m not quite sure what to do with this information but here it is anyway.
This is a pretty straightforward connection. Abraham Lincoln’s family moved from Virginia to Kentucky to Illinois between the 1790s and 1840, and so did mine. It’s not surprising that their extended families connected.
A few months ago, I read a novel about Lincon’s family history in Virginia. In his massive (1,500 pages) 1947 novel House Divided, Ben Ames Williams tells the story of five siblings in an established Confederate family in Virginia who discover that their grandfather was also the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. This is a wholly fictitious plot element; genealogists have never been able to identify the father of Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks. They all conclude that Nancy’s mother, Lucy Hanks, gave birth to Lincoln’s Nancy before she married. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about Lincoln’s background, so I was on familiar ground when I researched this connection.
As I have come to expect, Geni provided me with a different link. If you read my post from last week about President James Buchanan, you saw that I was connected to him through the Hunt family – specifically, Jefferson Hunt (in the middle of this chart). Here’s what I wrote about him last week:
I recognize these names back to Elizabeth “Betsy” Hunt and her brother Jefferson Hunt (although in my tree I have documentation that his first name is Thomas, not Charles, which makes sense because he was born in 1803, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson).
This line is fun because Jefferson Hunt converted to the Mormon faith in the 1820s and became a leader of the group that first settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, and then moved on to Salt Lake City under Brigham Young. The Mormons have written extensively about Jefferson Hunt. This is one reason I have this image, which is a hand-drawn map of the early life of John Hunt in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It is the frontispiece of a 1958 book Captain Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion by Pauline Udall Smith. I retrieved this book from the Hathitrust web site.
Jefferson Hunt was a member of the Nauvoo Legion in Nauvoo, where he was also ordained into the priesthood, but he and his family moved to Iowa early in 1846 when the persecution of Mormons in Nauvoo intensified. While in Iowa, he volunteered to serve in the Mexican War as Captain of Company A of the Mormon Battalion. This Battalion (the only religion-based unit ever formed in the U.S. Military) was created at the request of President Polk; the Saints had been asking for government protection against the persecution they had suffered at the hands of local residents in Nauvoo, and the Mormon leaders believed that federal help would be forthcoming if the Saints aided the United States in its military effort against Mexico.
Jefferson left military service in 1847. Pauline Udall Smith wrote a book all about him – Jefferson Hunt of the Mormon Battalion. He also has an entry in the four-volume set Conquerors of the West by Florence Youngberg. After his service with the military, he went to California and settled the part of the state that became San Bernardino, serving in the first California legislature from 1853 to 1857. He is honored as the “Founder of San Bernardino.” He moved back to Utah, settling in Ogden Valley, where the town of Huntsville is named in his honor.
This week, the connection moves through Jefferson Hunt’s wife, Celia Mounts.
This connection tracked fairly well at first. Celia’s mother was Mary Montgomery, and her mother was Martha Ellen Montgomery. From this point on, however, things get dicey. I’m having a hard time proving the various parts of this line.
So I decided to work from President Lincoln forward to Celia and Jefferson. I’m able to make the connection back to Lincoln’s aunt, Mary Lincoln (Crume), but I’m stuck in the Sarah Marks to George Marks to Sarah Marks connection on the third line of the Geni tree. This illustrates a major problem I have with Geni; the profiles of women on its one-world tree are identified by their married names, with their birth names in parentheses. This goes against generally accepted genealogy best practices because it is hard to trace the women, as they get disconnected from their birth names.
I think I could probably figure this out, and the connection may very well be there, but I don’t have time today to work any more on this.
Peace Out.
Peace.