Joseph Hanks was born December 20, 1725, in North Farnham Parish, Richmond County, Virginia - the Northern Neck country between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. His mother Catherine Hanks died in 1779. As executor of her will, Joseph inherited money from her estate, and that capital made the next move possible. By 1781 the Hanks family had relocated to a tract between the forks of Mike's Run off Patterson's Creek in Hampshire County, Virginia. The land had just become available with what one record described as cheap prices, proper surveys, and clear titles - the kind of arrangement that drew tenant farmers westward in the post-Revolution land rush. The 1782 Hampshire County census records eleven white people in the Hanks household: Joseph, Ann, and nine children, including a daughter named Lucy.

Two years later, in March 1784, Joseph Hanks sold his Hampshire County property under a mortgage arrangement and packed up the family for Kentucky. The route was the Wilderness Road - the trail Daniel Boone had marked through the Cumberland Gap - and the Hanks were part of the great post-Revolution surge of white settlers into the Bluegrass. With Joseph and Ann came eight of the children and a granddaughter named Nancy. The family eventually purchased land in February 1787, about two miles north of the mouth of Pottinger's Creek where it meets the Rolling Fork in Nelson County. The settlement was sometimes called Rolling Fork, sometimes Pottinger's Creek, after Samuel Pottinger, a Revolutionary War soldier who had built one of the protective stations of early Bardstown a few years earlier. The Hanks family farmed the land there until Joseph's death in 1793.

Joseph Hanks's children and grandchildren shaped Abraham Lincoln's youth in ways that are hard to overstate. Joseph's daughter Lucy Hanks was the mother of Nancy Hanks, who in turn married Thomas Lincoln and gave birth to Abraham. Joseph's daughter Elizabeth - Betsy Hanks Sparrow - assisted at Abraham Lincoln's birth and lived near the Lincoln family in both Kentucky and Indiana; young Abraham knew her as Granny before learning she was actually his great-aunt. Joseph's son Joseph Hanks Jr. is believed by some historians to have taught Thomas Lincoln the carpentry trade in Hardin County, Kentucky. Joseph's grandson Dennis Hanks lived with the Lincolns in Thomas Lincoln's home in Indiana. Another grandson, John Hanks, lived in the Lincoln household, took a flatboat trip down the Sangamon and Mississippi with the young Abraham in 1831, urged the family to move to Illinois, and worked as Abraham's rail-splitting partner - a partnership that later became central to Lincoln's 1860 campaign image.

Joseph Hanks's 1793 will gave the home and property to his wife Ann for her lifetime, and then to their youngest son Joseph Jr. But Ann decided to return to her familiar country. In 1794 she and Joseph Jr. sold the Rolling Fork land to her older son William, and Ann went back to Farnham parish in Virginia, where she died. The granddaughter Nancy who had walked west with the family in 1784 - the future Nancy Hanks Lincoln - went to live with her mother Lucy. The Kentucky property that the Hanks family had cleared and farmed for less than a decade was bought by Zachariah Riney. After Nancy Hanks married Thomas Lincoln and bore Abraham, Riney would go on to teach Abraham at the Knob Creek school. The threads of the family that began in colonial Virginia, paused in what is now West Virginia, and wound across Kentucky and Indiana all converged on the cabin where, in February 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born.