Grigsby, Sarah L.

Born: 1807-02-10 Elizabethtown, Kentucky

Died: 1828-01-20 Spencer County, Indiana

Alternate name: Lincoln

Sarah L. Grigsby was the eldest child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln and older sister of Abraham Lincoln. Sarah lived in Hardin County, Kentucky until 1816, when Thomas Lincoln moved the family to Spencer County, Indiana, establishing a homestead at Little Pigeon Creek. After the death of her mother in 1818, Sarah assumed the household responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, washing, cleaning clothes, and spinning wool. In the summer of 1826, Sarah married Aaron Grigsby and moved away from the Lincoln home. At the age of twenty, she died in childbirth. Abraham blamed her death on the negligence of the Grigsby family in sending for a doctor.

Gravestone, Pigeon Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, Dale, IN; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 22, 26, 34; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:4, 44, 45-46.