Bethsheba (Herring) Lincoln (abt. 1746 - abt. 1843)

Born about 1746 in Rockingham, Virginia

Ancestors

Died about 1843 at about age 97 in Millcreek, Union, Illinois, USA

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Biography

Bathsheba was born in 1748. She was the daughter of Alexander Herring and Abigail Harrison. She passed away in 1836. She is accepted by many sources to be Bathsheba Lincoln the grandmother of President Abraham Lincoln and the wife of Captain Abraham Lincoln. However, the known evidence lacks any contemporaneous document with the name Abraham Lincoln and Bethsheba Herring on it. Probably the best, professional, supportive synthesis of sources is "Lincoln's Lincoln Grandmother" by Charles H. Coleman. This article does an excellent and still up-to-date review of the multiple available sources of evidence and concludes that Abigail Herring was the mother of Bathsheba Herring and that Bathsheba Herring was the grandmother of Abraham Lincoln, the President. The article notes that the evidence is circumstantial, but the case for the author's conclusion is strong and clearly meets or exceeds the level of certainty generally applied in designating relationships in WikiTree. It would nevertheless be helpful if DNA evidence could be added.

See Bathsheba (Unknown) Lincoln for more discussion including sources questioning certainty of the evidence. However, that entry relies heavily on a 1998 letter of Paul H. Verduin stating that Bathsheba being a Herring was "a "tale" "invented in 1908, some 140 years after her marriage to President Lincoln's grandfather, by the daughter of one of the co-authors of the highly flawed study of the Lincoln genealogy which appeared at that time". Verduin wrote further that the daughter "visited Rockingham County that summer and enticed a story from a couple of individuals named Chrisman. The tale had never been heard before [1908], and there's absolutely no evidence for it." Coleman, in Lincoln's Lincoln Grandmother, does in fact reference a 1908 statement recognizing the marriage as between Bathsheba Herring and Abraham Lincoln. However, it is provided in a letter to J. Henry Lea from a man named Charles Griffin Herring and included in "The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln" (which Lea co-authored (cited below, at page 203, and is presumably being referenced by Verduin). Coleman does provide a separate account reportedly written by Herring Chrisman in 1900 about a meeting that Chrisman said he had with President-elect Lincoln in 1860. True or untrue, this by its own terms an "eye witness" statement. A description is quoted here from "Lincoln's Lincoln Grandmother" at page 67:

"In 1900 Herring Chrisman, great-grandson of William Herring, Bathsheba's brother, wrote his "Memoirs of Lincoln," which his son William Herring Chrisman published in 1930. In this forty-years-after- the-event account Herring Chrisman tells of a visit to President-elect Lincoln late in 1860. A native of Rockingham County, Chrisman had moved to Illinois in 1858. According to Chrisman's account of the 1860 visit, when Lincoln was told that his visitor's mother was a Herring, of Virginia, he accepted Chrisman as a kinsman (this, despite the fact that there is no evidence, other than Chrisman's story, that the President knew either the given name or the family name of his paternal grandmother). Nevertheless, Chrisman maintained that Lincoln replied, when asked if he knew his grandmother's name, "I think I have heard them say her name was Herring." With the family relationship accepted, Lincoln went on, "I have at last found a man with some of the same blood in his veins that I have."

Sources

• Lincoln's Lincoln Grandmother,Charles H. Coleman, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984) , Spring, 1959, Vol. 52, No, 1, Lincoln Sesquicentennial (Spring, 1959), pp. 59-90

• Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln, J. Henry Lea and J. R. Hutchinson, Houghton Mifflin (1909)

• Captain Abraham Lincoln

• Find a Grave

Acknowledgments

WikiTree profile Herring-546 was created by David Black through the import of David_s Family Tree_Ancestry_26Jun2013.ged on 23 Jul 2013.