Excerpt from The Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Short, Illustrated Biography<br><br>A cabin in the Kentucky wilderness; eighteen feet wide, sixteen feet long. The floor, packed - down dirt; sparse light through a solitary window. Opposite the open hearth a bed of cornhusks and bearskins. There, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln first saw the life of this world.<br><br>The father of the newborn was a carpenter by trade; a stout, thickset man with a round face, swarthy complexion and black hair. Later, when books were written about his famous son, he was sketched as an ever moving, shiftless, good-for-nothing creature. But his record shows nothing of the kind. Thomas Lincoln was sober, hard-working, industrious, not a great suc cess in life, but neither was he a failure. He owned hun dreds of acres of land and he was never without a horse. A tax book in 1814 lists him fifteenth out of ninety eight names in the valuation Of property owners.<br><br>His forebears came from England. Samuel Lincoln, 3 weaver's apprentice, left the Old Country in 1637, settling in Hingham, Massachusetts. From there the Lincolns spread to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, then westward along the Wilderness Road into Ken tucky. And it was in that state that twenty-eight-year Old Thomas Lincoln married twenty-two - year - Old Nancy Hanks on June 12, 1806.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.