When Nancy and Thomas had been married for just over 10 years, the family moved from Kentucky to western Perry County, Indiana, in 1816.

Nancy Lincoln died from milk sickness or consumption in 1818 at the Little Pigeon Creek Community in Spencer County when Abraham was nine years old.

Nancy's mother, by popular theory among historians and genealogists, and supported by a mtDNA study in 2015,[1][2] was Lucy Hanks, who later married Henry Sparrow in 1790 in Mercer County, Kentucky.

In March 1784, Joseph Hanks sold his property via a mortgage and moved his wife, eight children and young granddaughter Nancy to Kentucky.

[12][13] The family lived on land along Pottinger's Creek, in a settlement called Rolling Fork in Nelson County, Kentucky, until patriarch Joseph's death in 1793.

[11][15][16][17][18][19][20] After Lucy's sister Elizabeth Hanks married Henry Sparrow's brother Thomas in Mercer County, Kentucky in 1796, Nancy, now about age 12, went to live with the couple, whom she called mother and father.

Lucy's sister gave birth to an illegitimate son in 1799 named Dennis Friend Hanks, who was also raised by Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow.

[21] At the home of Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, Nancy would have learned the skills and crafts a woman needed on the frontier to cultivate crops and clothe and feed her family.

[10][18] On June 12, 1806, Hanks married Thomas Lincoln at Beechland,[23] the home of Richard Berry, by Reverend Jesse Head.

Neighbors reported[28] that Nancy Hanks Lincoln was "superior" to her husband, a mild yet strong personality who taught young Abraham his letters as well as the extraordinary sweetness and forbearance for which he was later known.

[32][nb 2]Nancy was also described as "a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of woman, stepping on to the very verge of propriety.

Her nine-year-old son Abraham assisted his father in the making of her coffin by whittling the wooden pegs that held the planks together.

Several people had died that fall from the illness, including Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, who raised her and then lived with her on the Lincolns' property at the Little Pigeon Creek settlement.

[44] This theory suggests that she died of cancer (which is a wasting disease) related to multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2b (MEN2B), and that she passed the gene for this syndrome to her son (see Medical and mental health of Abraham Lincoln).

[59][60] Nancy is portrayed by Maria Hill in the Daniel Boone episode "Before the Tall Man" and by Robin McLeavy in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."