The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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Diane Gladow grew up knowing that, somehow, she was related to Abraham Lincoln.

It wasn’t until she grew older that her mother managed to track down the ancestry line and confirm the claim that had been made through generations.

“As I got older, she began to get enough interest in this to start working,” Gladow said, spreading out the paperwork that documented the lineage.

Gladow said there is no one living who can claim a direct line to the 16th president, who was born 200 years ago today in Hodgenville, Ky. — though the birthplace is disputed by a few, who would place it in their own home areas.

Early deaths and lack of offspring apparently ended the descent from Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Gladow, however, can claim a direct line to Lincoln’s Aunt Mary, the sister of Lincoln’s father, Thomas; Nancy Hanks Lincoln was the president’s mother.

Thomas’s and Mary’s father, who also was named Abraham Lincoln, was a captain in the American Revolution, Gladow said.

It took time and cooperation from strangers, particularly around Kentucky, for Gladow’s mother, Gladys Crume McAdams, to track down the records as the Lincoln family moved from Virginia to Kentucky and on to Illinois, Gladow said.

As a result of her mother’s efforts, Gladow now knows for certain what she’s heard all along — she is the president’s first cousin, four times removed.

Working on geneaology then, in the 1960s, presented more challenges than today, when families have easy access to the Internet and its ancestry Web sites, the geneaological records of the Mormon church and a host of other new sources.

“Mother would have just loved to have had all those resources,” Gladow remarked. “She did it by establishing contacts with people across the country, especially in Kentucky, doing the legwork for her. ... That research still holds up today very well. They hit it right on the head.”

Her mother built up a collection of copies of letters, photographs, marriage certificates and other documents that verified the lineage and, sometimes through journals and letters, the lives of the family members who had gone before. As other members of the family contributed, the history grew into a massive collection that eventually found its way into a humpback trunk. McAdams had become keeper of the family records.

“After Mom died, my dad brought me all of her papers in an old trunk,” Gladow said. “It was really those letters that sucked me into this whole thing. ... I thought I’d like to know who these people were.”

There were some challenges sorting out the Crume side of Gladow’s family. Mary Lincoln married a Ralph Crume, but there had been four consecutive Ralph Crumes in that one family and all had married women named Mary.

She’d learned that Capt. Lincoln’s family lived close to the first Ralph Crume’s family in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. The Crumes then moved to Kentucky, and soon were followed by the Lincolns.

“What’s really interesting to me ... is the Crumes and the Lincolns were in close proximity in several locations,” Gladow said.

Capt. Lincoln was given substantial acreage because of his role in the American Revolution, and Gladow continues to wonder why both families left the relative security and beauty of the Shenandoah Valley to face the hardships of the trek to the wilderness of Kentucky.

Gladow has learned that Crume’s wife kept a dairy of memories of the journey to Kentucky, and that Capt. Lincoln was killed by Indians not too long after the family moved to Kentucky.

Many of the families’ records, as well as governmental records, burned in fires — particularly during the Civil War, when homes and entire towns were destroyed by the flames of battle. That was something that McAdams and Gladow encountered far too often as they researched their family tree and contacted previously unknown relatives in that area of the country.

“And they all said that they had letters that were destroyed in a fire,” Gladow said. “... That is a sentence you hear over and over again when you start looking for letters and things in the past. And who knows if the letters even existed in the first place.”

Gladow and her husband, Dean, have traveled extensively in the areas the Crumes and Lincolns called home, visiting small towns and cemeteries and looking for clues to fill in the gaps and answer the questions that still exist for the family.

They’ve also visited Springfield, Ill., and the buildings dedicated to preserving the artifacts and the memory of the fallen president. They’ve watched a man use a divining rod to “dowse” locations of graves in cemeteries that are so far removed from civilization that they’ve needed to ride over pastures in a pickup truck to reach the sites. They’ve gone to Virginia to see the properties where the Lincolns and the Crumes lived and brought back a collection of photographs to document all that they’ve seen and the people and far-distant relatives they’ve met.

“You can stand there and look out and you can see the Crume land,” Gladow said, showing a photograph taken from the Lincoln property looking toward Ralph and Mary Crume’s former property.

It was there, on the old Crume land, that the Battle of Bull Run was fought during the Civil War, she said, speculating at the excitement that must have erupted when the Crumes first heard about the battle from their new home in Kentucky.

Gladow knows that her great-grandfather, Silas Moses Crume, was the only family member who left Kentucky; he moved to Texas sometime in the 1850s, and his wife’s letters described what the young family encountered.

“And I guess that was pretty wild, too,” Gladow said.

From the East Coast to Kentucky, Illinois and Texas, then on to the New Mexico oil fields where her grandfather settled, the Gladows will continue traveling and tracing the Crume family line to flesh out the details, whether mundane or colorful, to keep for their own family and for future generations.

“Every generation, there must be a keeper, and I guess I’m the keeper,” Gladow said.

“We’re really careful about fires, I’m telling you.”