Mr. Shackford continues: “The Lincolns through which the President’s genealogy is traced were for six generations, with a single exception, pioneers in the settlement of new countries. I. Samuel, an early settler at Hingham, Massachusetts. II. Mordecai, of Scituate, who lived and died near where he was born. III. Mordecai, settled in Pennsylvania, thirty years before Berks County was organized. IV. John, went to the wilds of Virginia. V. Abraham, went to Kentucky with Boone when it was infested by savages. VI. Thomas, with his son Abraham, pioneers to Indiana.”
Mr. Shackford has traced the pedigrees of other members of the Lincoln family, in which the persistence of Scripture names is very marked. We content ourselves with the following, which bears directly on the connection of the Pennsylvania and Virginia families:
“Abraham, the posthumous son of Mordecai and Mary Lincoln of Amity, born in 1736, married Ann Boone, a cousin of Daniel, the Kentucky pioneer. Their grandson, David J. Lincoln of Birdsboro’, Pennsylvania, informs me that his father James, who died in 1860, at the age of ninety-four, and his uncle Thomas, who died in 1864, told him that Daniel Boone often visited his friends in Pennsylvania, and always spent part of his time with his cousin Ann, and that his glowing accounts of the South and West induced John Lincoln to remove to Virginia. After his removal he was known as ‘Virginia John,’ to distinguish him from others of the same name.”
A fact which will probably impress the reader is that among the numerous Lincolns mentioned in the six generations from Samuel, the immigrant in 1637, to Abraham, the President, two centuries later, there is not one that does not bear a scriptural name. A coincidence not less remarkable is the identity of names in the successive families.
Among the children of the first Mordecai, 1686, were Mordecai, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah.
Of the second Mordecai, 1727: Mordecai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
Of Abraham, brother of second Mordecai, 1745: Mordecai, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah—identical with the children of the first Mordecai; also John, Jacob, and Rebecca.
Of John of Virginia, or “Virginia John,” 1758: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, John.