Nancy Hanks' lineage

[maharba]

Nancy Hanks 1784-1818 died in Perry or Spencer county Indiana in October 1818. She had married Abraham Lincoln's father Thomas Lincoln. And Abraham born in 1809 was 9 years old when she died. The Lincoln's had lived in Kentucky from 1806 through most of 1816, then moved to Perry county, Indiana. While in Kentucky, the father Thomas Lincoln had joined a Baptist church which just started. One of its preachers was Rev David Elkins 1779-1857 a circuit-riding Baptist preacher mainly in Kentucky. When his mother died (we are told) the 9 year old Abraham Lincoln then wrote back (from Spencer or Perry county Indiana) to the Rev David Elkins in Hardin county Kentucky, and asked the Baptist preacher to come preach a memorial for his deceased and buried mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The circuit riding preacher rode horseback 100 miles from Kentucky into Indiana, and preached a well-attended, perhaps 200 people there, funeral memorial service for Nancy Hanks Lincoln.

I am sure that the memorial service did take place, but it strikes me as unusual. Could the 9 year old boy Abraham Lincoln actually write a letter? This surely must have been the very first letter Lincoln ever wrote, worth an immense amount of money now. Was it even written in longhand? Why would Lincoln have even wanted so much for that specific preacher to come do the service? I doubt that the boy Abraham Lincoln was that much attached to that church, or that Nancy or Thomas really were either. Why not just someone else, closer and handier to preach a service? It's months after the fact of her burial anyway. If I were Thomas the father, I
would have said...Rev Smith will be passing this way in March and he'll do a dandy job. I would have not acquiesced to the child's insistence. And I would have thought to myself...hmm...this preacher's circuit surely does not even take him out this way, I don't want to put the man out riding 100 miles in wild country. And if I were the preacher Rev David Elkins, I would have said Thanks but no thanks. But since the preacher did come and there were a couple hundred at the memorial service, and since it was all due to the insistence of the infant Abraham Lincoln, this should have
been one of the highlight memories of his life.