When Abraham was seven, his family moved to the free state of Indiana, where slavery wasn’t allowed and land was cheaper. Here, Abraham helped his father build their cabin, and family’s chores. Although he was only eight, Abraham was strong and good with axe, his father often had him help with the heavy work. When Abraham was not yet ten, a terrible summer illness swept through the area, and this “milk sickness took lives of the Sparrows, his mother’s relatives. Then his mother also got sick and died when she was only 34 years old. After a year, his father, Thomas Lincoln, traveled to Kentucky to marry an old friend, a lovely, and very nice woman named Sarah Bush Johnston. She became Abraham’s stepmother. When Abraham was 11, he attended school anytime there was a chance to break way from chores. By his fifteenth, he became an excellent speller and had learned to read and write. Neighbors who couldn’t read or write often asked him to write letters for