Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith

Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith was born on July 19, 1904 in Riverside, Illinois, to Jessie Harlan Lincoln and Warren Wallace Beckwith. His mother, the youngest daughter of Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln and his wife Mary, had eloped with her classmate Warren in 1897. His father was a star football player at Iowa Wesleyan College. Robert was the younger of his parents’ two children, and had an elder sister named Mary Lincoln Beckwith. He, along with his sister Mary and cousin Lincoln Isham, was one of the three last descendants of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln.

He attended a private school in Washington, D.C. and later enrolled into New York Military Academy in New York City. He also spent two years at the boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy, in which his grandfather Robert Todd Lincoln had studied.

He started working in the farm he inherited, not for profit, but as a hobby, and listed himself as a ‘gentleman farmer’.

While Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith generally avoided the media, there have been reports about him in the news many times, including once with pictures of him after he was arrested for speeding in Omaha, Nebraska, when he was young. However, what brought him into media attention during the latter half of his life was a vicious court battle regarding the paternity of the child of his second wife Annemarie Hoffman, which was extensively covered in the media. In 1975, he came under the radar once more after he became the last undisputed descendant of Abraham Lincoln following the death of his sister Mary Lincoln Beckwith, who had no children.

Annemarie Hoffman, the second wife of Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, gave birth to a son in October 1968 and named him Timothy Lincoln Beckwith. While Robert Beckwith was listed as the boy's father, he was in the process of divorcing her with accusations of adultery. He denied paternity of the child, and when his wife refused to do any blood test for her or her child, his lawyers on their side provided as proof the fact that he had had a vasectomy with a prostatectomy six years earlier. By the time the boy was seven years old in 1976, court trial begun to determine his Lincoln lineage. In September that year, the ruling judge granted the divorce stating the child was the product of an "adulterous relationship”. However, it was stated that whether the boy would have any claim on the family fortune was to be decided in a separate case.

After Robert Beckwith died in 1985, the inheritance issue made news headlines once again. He had divided his $3 million fortune among three charities: American Red Cross, Iowa Wesleyan College and the First Church of Christ, Scientist. However, the charities had to make sure no one claimed inheritance, and so they located a 17-year-old Timothy Lincoln Beckwith living with his mother, who married again. They reportedly offered him around $1 million, which he accepted.