Thomas Lincoln

[Susan Higginbotham]

I finished this today. It's a detailed, sympathetic biography of Thomas Lincoln, which takes issue with the notions that Thomas was shiftless and that he was hostile toward his son's desire to improve himself. It's worth reading for anyone interested in Lincoln's family, with the caveat that it was not well proofread. There was at least one instance in the printed version where a line or two of text was dropped, and the electronic version had such issues as well. The author also tends to repeat himself a bit; a more vigorous editing would have improved this.

[Gene C]

The Amazon product details indicates the book has 472 pages. That's a pretty good sized book
Since their page count includes everything from cover to cover, approx how many pages of text were there?
For me, genealogy is not the most interesting part to read, does that take up a large part of the book?

Did you find the book was enjoyable, easy to read, did it flow well?

[Susan Higginbotham]

It was a rather dry read, more informative than pleasurable. There is a fair amount of genealogical information, but it's mixed in with the rest of the information. (What it doesn't have is a genealogical table, which would have been helpful.) I would guess (not going back and counting) that there's about 30 pages of endnotes, as well as 60 pages or so of back matter (appendices, photo credits bibliography, index).

[Gene C]

Thank you -

[RJNorton]

Many thanks to Steve for sending these images. Steve writes, "I have a new document to post to the forum. It's a 1915 questionaire filled out by Orlando Flora, the source of the photograph that has long been claimed to be that of Thomas Lincoln. I thought it would be interesting to compare Flora's handwriting with the writing at the bottom of the photograph for a comparison and for the opinion of others on the forum."

[STS Lincolnite]

To my eye, a quick examination shows the shape, angle, and flow of the capital “T”s and “L”s in the above document are decidedly different from the “T”s and “L”s written on the photo. Notice particularly the word “Living” is written several times in the document. The the bottom of the “L” in each case flows directly into the following “i”. Whereas on the photo, there is a distinct break between the two letters when written consecutively in the word “Lincoln.”