Springfield Tour

[Anita]

(10-05-2016 11:15 PM)davg2000 Wrote:  Anita, when I wrote that post about Ann's stone in Oakland Cemetery, I was thinking of my great great grandfather's tombstone, which says that he died April 14, 1864. He actually died the night Lincoln was shot, in 1865. I found that out in the early 1990's only by reading a letter that one of his sons had written to a niece. One would think that closer descendants would have caught the error. Perhaps they did but didn't care enough to correct it. (Or maybe the error could not be easily corrected.) Enough careless or good-faith errors exist to make one be careful. In addition to dates, surnames and given names can be misspelled or just wrong. But I wouldn't have expected anyone to intentionally alter a line of poetry because he had a better feel for Lincoln's life than Masters had. What gall!

Gall is a great word and from Rob's posts Rankin sure had a lot of it. What's sad is that he got away with it and the tombstone stands today with the edited version. I'd like to put a marker with the correction next to it. By leaving out those words Rankin puts his spin on the Rutledge-Lincoln story history.