Re: Henry Sears

Henry and Vashti Sears daughter Elizabeth Sears married into my Estep line in Sangamon County, Illinois, and their only surviving child, Lawrence Sears, is my first cousin.

While I have not researched the parents of Henry Sears, I thought you might be interested to know that both he and his wife Vashti (a common nickname for Bathsheba) are mentioned in the book "Life of William McKinley, our martyred president, with short Biographies of Lincoln and Garfield."

Henry and Vashti Sears knew Abraham Lincoln quite well when he kept a store on the banks of the Sangamon in the New Salem region of Sangamon County, Illinois, as the Sears traded in that store. They are called Uncle Henry and Aunt Vashti Sears by the author Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, who published his book in 1901, shortly after Henry and Vashti passed away in Mason County, Illinois. They probably knew Abraham Lincoln in Mason County as well, since the young Lincoln became a surveyor and surveyed parts of Mason County as well as Sangamon County.

To quote from this book, page 326: Uncle Henry Sears and his wife, Aunt Vashti, say that they were well acquainted with storekeeper Lincoln and his lady-love Ann Rutledge. They attended her funeral and think that such a nice girl as Ann was, deserved such a handsome tombstone. "Young Lincoln took her death awful hard," they said. "He strolled moodily around the neighborhood for the next three or four weeks, humming sad songs, and writing with chalk on fences and barns. It was generally feared that the death of Ann Rutledge would drive him insane."

Ann Rutledge died in a typhoid epidemic of 1835 in Sangamon County. It was Lincoln's early friends and acquaintances from Sangamon County that spilled the beans about his deep love affair with Ann Rutledge; which went down in history as severely upsetting his wife Mary Todd. Among said bean spillers were Henry and Vashti Sears. There are other stories about the young man Abraham Lincoln as told by some of the other early settlers of the Old Salem region of Sangamon County, Illinois (formerly called New Salem) in this book also.

Here's a link to this book on line:

http://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofwilliammck01fall/lifeofwilliammck01fall_djvu.txthttp://www.archive.org/stream/lifeofwilliammck01fall/lifeofwilliammck01fall_djvu.txt

Kindest regards,
Cheron Gibon