Lincoln, Sarah

Born: 1788-12-13 Hardin County, Kentucky

Died: 1869-04-12 Coles County, Illinois

Alternate name: Bush, Johnston

Sarah Bush, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, was born and raised in what is today Elizabethtown, Kentucky. In 1806, she married Daniel Johnston and had three children with him before he died of cholera in 1816. After three years as a widow, she became Abraham Lincoln's stepmother when she married Thomas Lincoln on December 2, 1819. She and her three children moved to Spencer County, Indiana, to live with Thomas and his two children, Sarah and Abraham. In 1830, the Lincoln family moved to Macon County, Illinois, but ultimately settled in Coles County, Illinois. Throughout the years, Abraham Lincoln visited his stepmother often, and before he left on his inaugural trip to Washington, DC in February 1861, he traveled to Coles County, Illinois, to see her one last time.

Kenneth J. Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas: Taylor Trade, 2001), 16-18; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 28, 152, 271; Lincoln Family Record; Gravestone, Thomas Lincoln Cemetery, Coles County, IL.