Illuminations, Epiphanies, & Reflections

Family Trees                                

The Hanks Elizabeth Parsons Hank, 1800-1847 Elizabeth Parsons was born in 1800, the eldest daughter of James and Nancy Parsons.  Family records indicate that Elizabeth "finished her educational course at Morgantown Academy."  This poses something of a mystery as the Morgantown Female Academy was not chartered until 1831, well after Elizabeth would have passed the age of attendance.  However, the Morgantown Female Academy was an offshoot of the Monongalia Academy of Morgantown which established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1814, and Elizabeth would certainly have been at the right age to be enrolled there.  Some sources indicate that the Monongalia Academy was for males only, however that restriction may not have been in place from its very inception but perhaps instituted concurrently with the founding of the Morgantown Female Academy.  (Both academies were subsequently closed in 1866-7 and incorporated into the newly established West Virginia University.)  The academies included, of course, boarding arrangements, and an advertisement for the Morgantown Female Academy reads in part:  Gentlemen at a distance, wishing to send their daughters to school, cannot, it is believed, send them to a place where they will meet with less temptations and where they will be brought less under demoralizing influences, than the quiet moral, and retired village of Morgantown.  The trustees have been at considerable expense fitting up the buildings for the accomodation of pupils.  A number of boarders can be accomodated in the family of the principal, who resides in the building contiguous to the Academy. In 1826, Elizabeth married David Hank, a member of the same Hanks family (his grandfather dropped the "s" sometime in the late 1700s) from which, Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was descended.  The couple initially established a homestead in Monroe County, Virginia, but crossed the Ohio River in 1836 and settled in Gallia County, establishing a homestead within the Springfield Township.  Elizabeth and David had eight children; two died in childhood, and five moved further west, settling in Holden, Missouri.  The eighth, Caleb Robert Hank was stricken with an even greater wanderlust and headed to California in 1859 to seek his fortune as a miner. To James Parsons       To Caleb R. Hank