The Feb. 11th LA Times "Abraham Lincoln's paper trail" by P.J. Huffstutter.
A team of historians has been scouring the nation looking for any and everything 16th President Lincoln put pen to during his entire life.
John A Lupton and Ericka Nunamaker have recently returned from a 6 day, five state, 1,400 mile odyssey and tracked down 33 documents.
Over the last 7 years researchers have found more than 1000 documents written by him and nearly 28,000 written to him.
When a document is located, it is scanned and the originals returned to the owners.
Luptak believes there are tens of thousands more. There are also ten others looking from the Illinois-based Papers of Abraham Lincoln. You can go to their website at: www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org.
This is a joint project by the Illinois Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum.
Lupton is considered a leading expert at Lincoln's writing. He can even tell you if the president was in a thoughtful mood if the writing has neat, careful strokes, or tired if they were jagged lines. He has located hundreds of hastily-signed military commissions that he has determined were used by Lincoln as busy-work to help him stay awake at night while caring for his ailing son..
The papers project began in the 1980s and Lupton joined the team in 1991. Once, he found mention of bankers accused of bilking shareholders. Lupton found that the case was moved to southern Illinois. He went to the Macoupin County records office and sifted through thousands of documents until he struck paydirt. There was a 43 page legal argument written in Lincoln's on hand, the largest known document by Lincoln.
Of course, now that we are approaching the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, this will come even more to the forefront.
Talk About a Great Job. I Sure Would Like to Get in on This. --Da Old B-R'er
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