Eleanor Riney

Father, John Maraman Mother, Ann Vowels

Eleanor married Thomas Edward Riney before 1759 in St Mary's Co, MD. No actual marriage document has been found.

ABOUT HER SON ZACHARIAH RINEY:

Source: "Riney Family" book, 1977, by Patricia Riney Webber.

Zachariah went to live with trappist monks at Gethsemani, Ky at the age of 94 and died two years later. Had a son named Sylvester 1805-1870 buried at Rineyville, Ky. Rineyville is a small town NW of Elizabethtown, Ky. Sylvester's son, , born 1837, became a Trappist Monk and is also buried at Gethsemani.

[http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=100760870]

William Benedict Riney

Zachariah floated down the Ohio River with his brother and father in 1795. He witnessed the will of Silvester Wathen on 16 Sept. 1803.

Zachariah Riney bought a farm in 1811 on the Rolling Fork in Washington Co, Ky which originally belonged to Joseph Hanks. Joseph Hanks is either the Father or Grandfather of Nancy Hanks, the Mother of Abraham Lincoln. The same year, Thomas Lincoln, Father of Abraham, moved his family to a farm on Knob Creek, about two miles from the Riney home. Zachariah Riney is credited with being the first teacher of Abraham Lincoln. In the replica of Abe Lincoln's Knob Creek boyhood home, there is a sign stating that Zachariah Riney was the first teacher of Abraham Lincoln.

"Lincoln's Parentage and Childhood", by Louis A. Warren, Pages 210 to 213 are devoted to discussing Zachariah Riney.

Source: Christine Murcia

Rineyville, Kentucky was not named for Zachariah Riney but was instead named for his son on whose property it was located on.

The school-house was a low cabin of round logs, with split logs or "puncheons" for a floor, split logs roughly leveled with an ax and set up on legs for benches, and holes cut out in the logs and the space filled in with squares of greased paper for window-panes. The main light came in through the open door. Very often Webster's "Elementary Spelling-book" was the only text-book. This was the kind of school most common in the middle West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood, though already in some places there were schools of a more pretentious character. Indeed, back in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a child of six, was learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a year older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county. It is doubtful if they ever met, but the destinies of the two were strangely interwoven, for the older boy was Jefferson Davis, who became head of the Confederate government shortly after Lincoln was elected President of the United States.

Zachariah Riney, a Roman Catholic, whose peculiarities have not been wholly effaced from the memory of his since so distinguished pupil. But although this teacher was himself an ardent Catholic, he made no proselyting efforts in his school, and when any little religious ceremonies, or perhaps mere catechising and the like, were to be gone through with, all Protestant children, of whom, it is needless to say that young Abraham was one, were accustomed to retire, by permission or command. Riney was probably in some way connected with the movement of the " Trappists," who came to Kentucky in the autumn of 1805, and founded an establishment (abandoned some years later) under Urban Guillet, as superior, on Pottinger's Creek. They were active in promoting education especially among the poorer classes, and had a school for boys under their immediate supervision. This, however, had been abandoned before the date of Lincoln's first school-days, and it is not improbable that the private schools under Roman Catholic teachers were an offshoot of the original system adopted by these Trappists, who subsequently removed to Illinois.

Lincoln...went "for two brief periods" to a nearby school, though mainly for company for his sister rather than to learn anything. "It was first taught by one Zachariah Riney, about whom little is known except that he was a Catholic."

Was it the "Knob Creek School," "the log schoolhouse on Cumberland Road," or an unnamed "nearby school"? Was the teacher an unnamed, 52-year old Catholic slave owner, or were there two teachers - a named Catholic (Riney) and Caleb Hazel?

The first teacher was Zachariah Riney, a Roman Catholic, from whose schoolroom the Protestants were excluded, or excused, during the opening exercises. Lincoln had to quit school because his mother did not want her son taught by a Catholic.

No school-house had been provided when Zachariah Riney proposed to open a school. He was a Roman Catholic priest, who travelled through the settlements teaching a few weeks in a place.

Sarah Bickett, Daughter of William, was married 3 times. She lost the first two to death. The third, Zachariah Riney, left her and went to live at Gethsemane with grandson Brother Benedict. Sallie (Sarah) lived on in a separate house built by her brother, who found her disposition too much to bear under his own roof. Brother Benedict (William B. Riney) died 3-14-1912 and was buried at Gethsemane.

1795 Washington Co. Deed Book A p.253, Sept. 3, 1795==Zechariah purchased land from Richard Parker. 100 ½ acres on Parker's Run of Cartwright Creek.

1799 Washington County Tax Records listed Zachariah Riney, 100 acres of land

1810 listed as St. Rose Convent

"These statistics were taken from the family Bible now in the possession of Mrs. C.G. Haywood, 3509 Fernlee Ave., Louisville, KY (502) 447-4744, who was the former Cecilia Gertrude Riney, dau. of Thomas Pius Riney and Clara A. Wiseman, m. October 8, 1878. The dates listed are all mentioned in the Bible, many do not have dates of death. This sheet of information was sent to Ozetta Riney from Agnita Heer--Mrs. John C. Heer of 2212 Wendell Avenue, Louisville, KY 40205." This page retyped by Sara Riney on 1/1/99.

Zachariah Riney was born about 1763 in St. Mary's County, Maryland; he came to Kentucky about 1795. Died at Gethsemani 2-15-1859 and was buried at the Monastery.

Zachariah's children: Sylvester, b. 2-22-1805 d. 10-12-1870. This is the only child that my mother can remember ever hearing about, and the only one listed in the Bible.

However, the Marriage bonds of Nelson County, KY 1785-1832 list James BOWLING married Eleanor Riney, daughter of Zachariah Riney. Zachariah Riney Surety 8-7-1813

THE LINCOLN HERITAGE TRAIL by Bill Andrews:

Because Kentucky inherited Virginia’s confusing land laws, Lincoln’s father was constantly beset by claims against his farm. In 1811, just two years after Abe’s birth, the Lincoln family moved to an unsettled area ten miles to the northeast on Knob Creek where the father built another cabin and cleared the land. This was the first home that Abe could remember and it was the first occasion of any schooling. He and his older sister Sarah briefly attended a small school run by Zachariah Riney of Maryland, an ancestor to my sister-in-law Susan Sullivan Andrews. Today a small reproduction cabin stands where the original Lincoln dwelling reputedly stood. Abraham later recalled that his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, gave birth to a younger brother who died at the Knob Creek farm.

My brother John is a Washington attorney whose office is on the tenth floor of The Lincoln Center. When he looks down from his window, he can see the Ford Theater where the assassination took place. We have both been to the Memorial many times but each visit seems to excite the same feelings of awe and inspiration. And though I can understand the trend to “bring Lincoln down from the clouds,” sometimes that transit can be ludicrous. There is a life-sized statue of Lincoln at Gettysburg where he is giving directions to a bronzed tourist who looks like Perry Como. It should, of course, be remembered that Lincoln loved levity.

When the Memorial was dedicated in 1922, the president’s seventy-nine-year-old son Robert Todd Lincoln was present for the occasion. He must have been impressed to see the twenty-foot high likeness of his father looking out through Doric columns to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond. Some might argue that the statue is overly grandiose and pretentious, too imperial looking for a democracy. Such sentiment ignores the man’s achievement and tries to make him one of us. He wasn’t. We’ve never had a president like him. The statue does not consider his humble birth, his family life, his personality or his humanity – all of which are important and memorialized elsewhere. It represents wisdom, vision and steadfastness in preserving something important to all of us – the Union. The chiseled epitaph over his head says as much.

Etched into the walls on either side of the great statue are excerpts from the Gettysburg Address and that of the Second Inaugural. When he gave the latter speech, the war was almost over and only the unhinged doubted the outcome. After emphasizing the need for the victors to show magnanimity (“with malice toward none and charity for all”), Lincoln declared what he believed all along to have been the underlying cause of the war. He wrote “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.” Yes he wanted to bind the nation’s wounds but he was also human and he was judging. The country had experienced a catastrophe and he was venting. One out of every forty-seven Americans died in that conflict. To put that cold statistic into perspective, it would be the equivalent of over 6 million American soldiers killed in today’s population.

For Lincoln, the cause of the Civil War was slavery. I know it’s fashionable today for revisionists to say that the war was the result of states rights or sectional economic competition. Even Lincoln would agree that only a minority of southerners were fighting for slavery (fewer than a quarter of Southern whites owned slaves). This, however, is not to say that slavery was peripheral. Lincoln understood that the Southern state legislatures that promoted secession were dominated by planter aristocrats, slave owners and those aspiring to such status. When they drew up their ordinances of secession, they considered slavery the central issue. So did Lincoln. Revisionist historians do our ancestors an injustice by parsing their words and by reinterpreting their statements. It is arrogant to suggest that slavery was not the central issue when the leaders of the conventions voting for secession declared loud and clear that slavery was the issue. The Mississippi rationale is typical:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest … portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun…There was no choice but submission to the mandates of abolitionists, or a dissolution of the Union...”

When my brother looks out his office window, he can’t see the Petersen Boarding House where the president was taken for the death vigil. His building hovers over that small structure. When I viewed the room where Lincoln expired, it seemed no larger than the floor space of the humble cabin of his Kentucky birth (the bed was so short that the 6’4” man had to be placed diagonally). Admittedly there is some circularity. An existentialist might even say that what transpires between birth and death is anecdote, a melancholy footnote illustrating a disaffected fate. Not so the Lincoln Memorial. That spacious temple illustrates that an individual can change the course of history. It is the Great Man theory in marble. It is more than a footnote to Lincoln. Its encrypted meaning visually expresses the words of a tearful Edwin Stanton at the moment of Lincoln’s passing: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Mar 7 2018, 1:06:43 UTC