Lincoln Editor

              January - March 2005 Volume 5 Number 1
NEW GRADUATE ASSISTANT JOINS PROJECT
FAMILY ALLOWS PROJECT TO DIGITIZE 1835 SURVEY BY LINCOLN
In December 2004, Margaret Kincaid made her family’s
early Lincoln document available to project editors for
digitization. An 1835
survey, the document
had been in her late
husband’s family since
Lincoln prepared it in
1835. Her husband
was the great-grandson
of John K.
Kincaid, the man for
whom Lincoln created
the survey.
As the project
continues to collect
Lincoln documents for
Series II and Series III,
we are grateful to individuals who come forward to share
Jenifer Maseman joined the project in January as a graduate
assistant. She is pursuing a Master’s degree in English at
the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). She is in her
first year of the program and is interested in classical literature,
especially Shakespeare. Maseman earned a Bachelor’s
degree in English from UIS in May 2004. She lives in Auburn,
Illinois, with her husband Brett and thirteen-year-old daughter
Kati. Her eight-year-old son lives in Florida.
Maseman is the project’s first graduate assistant from
the English department at UIS. Her expertise in English is
serving her well in her work with the project. As a graduate
assistant, Maseman is involved in the important task of fact-checking
chapters that project editors have prepared for the
selective book edition. This work involves checking for
accuracy of historical facts presented in the chapters and of
source citations in footnotes. Maseman is also editing digital
images the project has already collected for Series II and
Series III, and she is working on
organizational tasks related to
maintaining working files for the
Papers of Abraham Lincoln. As
the project prepares to handle the
enormous task of tracking Lincoln
documents and the digital images
collected, project graduate
assistants like Maseman are
playing an important role.
their privately owned Lincoln documents. While it is relatively
easy to locate Lincoln documents in libraries and archives, it
is far more difficult to locate documents in private collections.
We particularly appreciate owners who provide access to
their documents so that project editors can digitize, transcribe,
and annotate these lesser-known Lincoln documents.
This survey is a rare, early example of Lincoln’s work
as a young surveyor living in New Salem, Illinois. On March
24, 1835, Abraham Lincoln surveyed for John K. Kincaid
a tract of land in Sangamon County, Illinois, near Athens
(now in Menard County). At the time, Lincoln was a deputy
surveyor under Sangamon County Surveyor and Democrat
John Calhoun, with whom Lincoln developed a friendship
despite their political differences.
John K. Kincaid migrated with his family to
Sangamon County from Bath County, Kentucky, in 1832.
He purchased public land to begin farming, which was his
lifelong profession.
Jenifer Maseman