...Holston River. Later, he seems to have undertaken to learn the trade of carpenter in the shop of Joseph Hanks in Elizabethtown. When Thomas Lincoln was about twenty-eight years old he married Nancy Hanks , a niece of his employer, near Beechland, in Washington County. She was a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, also from Virginia, and so far superior to her husband in education that she coul...