Lincoln's birthday

[STS Lincolnite]

(01-19-2017 12:53 AM)Steve Wrote:  Burlingame in his biography of Lincoln gives Thomas Lincoln's birth as "around 1776".

I'm curious to know where Burlingame came up with the c.1776 date or what sources he consulted to make that determination.

I have visited Thomas Lincoln's grave site and the current marker there lists his birthdate as 6 January 1778. I also have a photo of the marker that was there before the current one. When I get home I will check to see if that had a date on it. From what I understand, the birth date of 6 January 1778 was calculated from Abraham Lincoln reporting that his father was 73 years and 11 days old at the time of his death. Based on this, the National Park Service considers 1778 to be Thomas Lincoln's birth year.

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(01-19-2017 12:53 AM)Steve Wrote:  If Thomas was recording births and deaths contemporaneosly, why isn't the infant Thomas' birth and death included in the record Lincoln wrote?

I highly doubt that Thomas himself was recording anything contemporaneously. By pretty much every account I have ever read, he and Nancy Hanks Lincoln were almost certainly illiterate. Either someone wrote a record for them or the "vital dates" were simply passed along orally until someone who could write took the time to record them. The latter seems probable to me. That idea or thought of course does not provide for any hard documentation that is able to be corroborated by another source (as far as definitive birth dates) but as I have stated before, I find Abraham Lincoln himself to be the most reliable source on the matter we are likely to find at this point.

As far as the infant Thomas, if it wasn't written at the time, I guess it doesn't seem all that strange to me that nothing would have been recorded later seeing as how he didn't live long. I think people viewed such things differently in the past than we might today. My own grandmother had a sister who died as an infant. She knew nothing about the sister until she happened to visit the graves of her grandparents when she was a young adult. And there was a grave for her sister in the same plot. She told me about that many, many years later and I asked her how she didn't know she had another sister before that. Her response was "well, she died and was gone so nobody talked about her. So how would I know?" Well I guess I can understand that. Maybe with having died in the early 1800s in Kentucky with a grave that was left behind when the family moved to Indiana then Illinois, young Thomas was just sort of a forgotten part of the family or an afterthought and therefore not recorded later on. Sad, but I don't think it is outside the realm of possibility.