I grew up with my maternal grandmother telling stories. It turns out that a lot of them weren’t true, but they tended to have some nugget of verity that she created a narrative around - or maybe she’d been told the wrong thing, too! I’ll never know because she’s been gone nearly 20 years and for the last few years she was here, she had no memory of who I was. But her grandmother was Emily Esther (Lincoln) Hackett.
I’ve written about her marriage and children previously.
And a story my grandmother used to tell me was that she was a cousin of President Abraham Lincoln.
My grandmother wrote an essay and won a speech contest in grade school with her rendition of the family connection to the Great Emancipator! There’s a family reunion every year in Iowa that she swore she’d take me to some day. Now, the reunion is real. There has been one for the family of the President held in Illinois, but the one my family was invited to was for the descendants of Jonah Lincoln (1760-1845), Emily’s great-grandfather from Windham, Connecticut. Many of his grandchildren who ended up going west ended up in Iowa and further into the plains. Yet others remained in Connecticut. They switched around where the reunion was held until settling on Glenwood/Pacific Junction by the 1940s.
So my great-great-grandmother being a Lincoln was a Big Deal when I was growing up. She was Grandma Emily, or Emily Esther Lincoln. I don’t think I heard her called anything else - of course, she’d been gone some time before I came around.
Emily was the youngest of 9 children.
And she understood preserving family history. She handwrote a genealogy that I still have - faded and losing its message due to the acidity of the paper it’s written on, but it’s been transcribed and digitized to save it from time. She also attempted to get my grandmother on the track of memorialization - writing her letters about the family to help her get into DAR.
I found out from her obituary that she had been a member of The Order of the Eastern Star (essentially the female Freemasons at the time, supporting Charity, Truth, and Loving Kindness - it’s still around! Some of my fellow DAR daughters are members of the local chapter of OES). So service is in the family!
Grandma Emily was the last Lincoln in the family - and whether she held her birth name to as a high a regard as her granddaughter did, I don’t know. But she did continue using it as a second middle name, as seen in how she signed the letters to my grandmother (so formal!).
What I do know, is that she held her family origins in high regard, ensuring that, even generations later, we know where she came from.