This James Shanklin was born in Rockingham county, Virginia, in 1766, and died in Mason county in 1861, in his ninety-fourth year. He married Hannah Hopkins and with her, a plucky pioneer helpmeet, emigrated to Kentucky in 1794. He was a descendant of Thomas Shanklin who came to America from the north of Ireland many years previous to the Revolutionary war. He first located in Pennsylvania but afterward went to Rockingham county, Virginia. Thomas, the father of James Shanklin, the founder of the family in Kentucky, and the subject's great-greatgrandfather, was one of the founders of the Cook's Creek (Virginia) church, this having been established in 1759, and the edifice in which worship was held in those far-away days is still standing. The mother of James Shanklin was a Miss Gordon, a sister of the wife of John Hopkins, whose sister in turn married the subject's great-grandmother's brother, Archibald Hopkins. The Hopkins brothers were all Revolutionary soldiers.
Archibald Hopkins and his brothers, John and William, located in the Shenandoah Valley before 1749, setting up their home in Rockingham county, Virginia, they and the Gordons, also Mr. Franklin's forebears, being the pioneer settlers of that part of Virginia. The Gordons, the Hopkins and the Shanklin famillies intermarried and the blood of these three families flows in the veins of John T. Shanklin. John Hopkins and Thomas Shanklin married sisters, the daughters of Thomas M. Gordon. James Shanklin was an elder in the Presbyterian church for many years and the leader of music.
