Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five
children went back to Kentucky and settled in Jefferson County. Little
is known of this pioneer Lincoln or of his father. Most of the records
belonging to that branch of the family were destroyed in the civil
war. Their early orphanage, the wild and illiterate life they led on
the frontier, severed their connection with their kindred in the East.
This, often happened; there are hundreds of families in the West
bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses
in the older States or in England, which, by passing through one or
two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost
their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had
intervened between the last century and this. Even the patronymic has
been frequently distorted beyond recognition by slovenly pronunciation
during the years when letters were a lost art, and by the phonetic
spelling of the first boy in the family who learned the use of the
pen. There are Lincolns in Kentucky and Tennessee belonging to the
same stock with the President, whose names are spelled "Linkhorn" and
"Linkhern." All that was known of the emigrant, Abraham Lincoln, by
his immediate descendants was that his progenitors, who were Quakers,
came from Berks County, Pennsylvania, into Virginia, and there throve
and prospered. [Footnote: We desire to express our obligations to
Edwin Salter, Samuel L. Smedley, Samuel Shackford, Samuel W.
Pennypacker, Howard M. Jenkins, and John T. Harris, Jr., for
information and suggestions which have been of use to us in this
chapter.] But we now know, with sufficient clearness, through the
wide-spread and searching luster which surrounds the name, the history
of the migrations of the family since its arrival on this continent,
and the circumstances under which the Virginia pioneer started for
Kentucky.