the word "Emancipator," first saw the light. Born and nurtured in
penury, inured to hardship, coarse food, and scanty clothing,--the story
of his youth is full of pathos. Small wonder that when asked in his
later years to tell something of his early life, he replied by quoting a
line from Gray's Elegy:

"The short and simple annals of the poor."

Lincoln's ancestry has been traced with tolerable certainty through five
generations to Samuel Lincoln of Norfolk County, England. Not many
years after the landing of the "Mayflower" at Plymouth--perhaps in the
year 1638--Samuel Lincoln's son Mordecai had emigrated to Hingham,
Massachusetts. Perhaps because he was a Quaker, a then persecuted sect,
he did not remain long at Hingham, but came westward as far as Berks
County, Pennsylvania. His son, John Lincoln, went southward from
Pennsylvania and settled in Rockingham County, Virginia. Later, in 1782,
while the last events of the American Revolution were in progress,
Abraham Lincoln, son of John and grandfather of President Lincoln, moved
into Kentucky and took up a tract of government land in Mercer County.
In the Field Book of Daniel Boone, the Kentucky pioneer, (now in
possession of the Wisconsin Historical Society), appears the following
note of purchase:

"Abraham Lincoln enters five hundred acres of land on a Treasury
warrant on the south side of Licking Creek or River, in Kentucky."

At this time Kentucky was included within the limits and jurisdiction of
Virginia. In 1775 Daniel Boone had built a fort at Boonesborough, on the
Kentucky river, and it was not far from this site that Abraham Lincoln,
President Lincoln's grandfather, located his claim and put up a rude log