An Aside - My 16 Storyteller Challenge #8

The Lincoln family legacy

My grandmother with her grandmother. Emily Esther Lincoln Hackett and Alice (Rownes) Maertz. Taken prior to October 1957.

This post is part of Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge. These posts are an addition to my weekly research/lineage/commentary posts. For 8 weeks and 8 prompts, we choose one of our pairs of 2x-great-grandparents and tell a part of their story.

This week’s prompt is the last one, due Feb. 24: How their lives connect to my own story today.

I chose my mother’s mother’s mother’s father and mother for this one (Alicia1, Marianne2, Alice3, Ruth4, Emily and Fred5) because great-great-grandma Emily is why I do genealogy!

My grandmother used to write to her grandmother to ask about family connections and to get the snippets of family tree she needed to join genealogical societies. As an adult, I also joined DAR by simply proving through birth certificates that I’m my grandmother’s granddaughter - her and Emily had already done the work!

Emily Esther Lincoln’s paternal grandparents were a westward-moving branch of the Jonah Lincoln descendants from Windham, Connecticut - Jonah’s father had been in the Revolutionary War. The family was very proud of these American credentials.

Grandma Emily’s handwritten family tree was a staple of my early research. I would scour books and indexes for any mention of her relatives. I would search out the connection to President Lincoln that my grandmother was so enamored with.

But it’s also been the documentation of Emily and Fred’s families that broke the illusion I had as a young girl about “doing genealogy.” We aren’t related to President Lincoln. There was never a Hackett on the “Maryland Supreme Court” (that judicial body, Supreme Court of Maryland, didn’t exist until 2022 - it was the Maryland Court of Appeals from 1776 until recently) - in fact, our branch was English. Whenever I question if I’m being too strict in finding evidence for a claim, I remember my great-great-grandparents and the stories my grandmother had me believing about them.

Not that it’s her fault, it turns out she was told the same things.

Debunking a Family Myth and I Finally Know the Source

But I also used to sit in the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen in Indiana, watching the birds pick at the cherry tree in the yard while I listened to her talk for hours about her youth at Emily and Fred’s farm in Iowa. And though there were missing pieces that would only come out with the digitization of records that refused to stay hidden, that generational connection created the interest I have in family history today.

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Frederick Ralph Hackett was the fifth child of an English immigrant and a hardworking maverick from Pennsylvania (by all accounts anyway - Claretta Marker ran the farm Fred grew up on in Illinois and even owned the land despite being a woman). Emily Esther Lincoln was the youngest daughter of a pioneering family that moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa and beyond. Although Emily and Fred put down roots in Iowa, they retired to Florida.

I can relate - I was raised in Indiana, moved to New York, then North Carolina, and have somewhat been rooted in New Hampshire (in a year I’ll have lived in my current house the longest of any of my previous abodes). And now we’re looking at where we’d like to retire (somewhere warm - I agree with Great-Great-Grandma and Grandpa on this one).

But as I said above, where the Hackett grandparents in Iowa really relate to me today is this newsletter. Sharing the family history just like Grandma Emily and her granddaughter used to do. Although I probably keep fewer secrets.