1. Thomas Lincoln struggled to make a successful living for his family and faced difficult challenges in Kentucky real estate boundary and title disputes, the early death of his first wife, and the integration of his second wife's family into his own family, before making his final home in Illinois.
Thomas Lincoln was descended from Samuel Thomas Lincoln, a respected Puritan weaver, businessman and trader from the County of Norfolk in East Anglia who landed in Hingham in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637.
Mordecai and Hannah's son, John Thomas Lincoln settled in Rockingham County, Virginia and built a large, prosperous farm nestled in the Shenandoah Valley.
John Thomas Lincoln gave 210 acres of prime Virginia land to his first son, Captain Abraham Thomas Lincoln, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War.
Thomas Lincoln amassed an estate of 5,544 acres of prime Kentucky land, realizing the bounty as advised by Daniel Boone, a relative of the Lincoln family.
Josiah and Thomas Lincoln were forced to make their own way.
Thomas Lincoln served in the state militia at the age of 19 and became a Cumberland County constable at 24.
Thomas Lincoln was active in community and church affairs in Hardin County.
In 1805, Thomas Lincoln constructed most of the woodwork, including mantels and stairways, for the Hardin house, now restored and called the Thomas Lincoln Heritage House at Freeman Lake Park in Elizabethtown.
On June 12,1806, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks at Beechland in Washington County, Kentucky.
Dennis Hanks, Abraham's friend and second cousin, reported that Nancy Hanks Thomas Lincoln had remarkable perception.
Thomas Lincoln developed a modicum of talent as a carpenter and although called "an uneducated man, a plain unpretending plodding man", he was respected for his civil service, storytelling ability and good-nature.
Thomas Lincoln was known as a "wandering" laborer, shiftless and uneducated.
Thomas Lincoln did not have the money to pay attorney's fees to resolve title disputes, such as liens against previous owners and survey errors.
Thomas Lincoln moved the family to Indiana in December 1816, and purchased land in accordance with the land ordinance of 1785, partly because slavery had been excluded in Indiana by the Northwest Ordinance.
Thomas Lincoln found that his skills as a carpenter were in demand as the community grew.
In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Thomas Lincoln contracted milk sickness by drinking milk of a cow that had eaten the white snakeroot plant.
Thomas Lincoln assisted in building the Little Pigeon Baptist Church, became a member of the church, and served as church trustee.
Sarah Thomas Lincoln became a valued member of the household, and she and Abraham became very close.
David Herbert Donald, noting that Thomas Lincoln's eyesight began to fail in the 1820s, described his struggle to support his family:.
Thomas Lincoln regularly hired his son out to work for other farmers in the vicinity, and by law he was entitled to everything the boy earned until he came of age.
In 1851, at the age of 73, Thomas Lincoln died and was buried at nearby Shiloh Cemetery, which was 3 miles from his home.
Thomas Lincoln sent Abraham to work for neighbors, generating money for Thomas.
Lastly, some say that Thomas Lincoln favored John Johnston, his stepson, over Abraham.
Thomas Lincoln had religious grounds for disliking slavery, and these served as a partial reason for moving from Kentucky to north of the Ohio River where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.