[HN Gopher] Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the same phot...
___________________________________________________________________
Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the same photo (2010)
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 121 points
Date : 2026-04-17 09:18 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prologue.blogs.archives.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (prologue.blogs.archives.gov)
| triceratops wrote:
| Tl;dr a picture in which a historian spotted 7-year old Teddy
| Roosevelt watching Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession from the
| window of his grandfather's house in New York. Very cool story!
| xrd wrote:
| When I hear the name Lincoln now, I can't help but think of the
| fake Letterboxd review of Melania: "the worst experience I've had
| at a theatre." By Abraham Lincoln.
| WalterBright wrote:
| too soon?
| GCA10 wrote:
| The timeline doesn't match up here. We're told that historian
| Stefan Lorant was doing his research in the 1950s. Then we're
| told that he checked with Teddy Roosevelt's wife and got her
| confirmation that one of the children in the window was Teddy
| Roosevelt.
|
| Roosevelt was married twice, and his first wife, Alice Hathaway
| Lee, died in 1884, so it's not her. But his second wife, Edith
| Carow, died in 1948, at age 87. So unless Lorant interviewed her
| posthumously, via seance, it can't be her, either.
|
| Our best hope of rescuing this anecdote is to assume that
| Lorant's research happened earlier (1940s?) while Edith Carow
| Roosevelt was still alive. But she would have been just three
| years old at the time of Lincoln's funeral, and while her family
| and the Roosevelt's family socialized together, even her quoted
| reminiscence is less than definitive about whether that's
| actually TR.
|
| Possible? Sure. Probable? Maybe. 100% verified? No way.
|
| From what's presented to us, this sounds like a cool legend
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This came up in a Reddit discussion a while back. Snopes has an
| article about it, in which they quote a source which says that
| the actual interview happened in 1948.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roosevelt-lincoln-funeral/
| dylan604 wrote:
| > But she would have been just three years old at the time of
| Lincoln's funeral, and while her family and the Roosevelt's
| family socialized together, even her quoted reminiscence is
| less than definitive about whether that's actually TR.
|
| While she might not have direct memory of the event, it would
| not be unheard of for older relatives to explain the picture to
| her when she was older. Just because she doesn't remember it
| directly does not automatically make the story of the picture
| untrue.
| saalweachter wrote:
| So her recollection is that she was in the house to view
| Lincoln's funeral procession. She didn't, because she was
| three and got scared, but it was still an event she was a
| part of.
|
| Even if she didn't remember whether Teddy was standing at
| that window at that time, she probably knew that she at Teddy
| and his brother were at the mansion for the event.
|
| So we have the Roosevelt mansion, knowledge that not many
| boys would have been allowed to be in that window, and
| confirmation that Teddy Roosevelt was there watching at that
| time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have a few vague memories of being 3. I expect if something
| dramatic had happened, I'd remember that.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The blog article links Stefan Lorant's own recollection of the
| event, but the link is broken (fair enough, the blog entry is
| from 2010). Fortunately though, the link is archived on the
| Wayback Machine [0], where we can see it is an article from
| American Heritage, June 1955.
|
| In the linked article Lorent does not specify when exactly he
| interviewed Edith Carrow Roosevelt, but I think it is fair to
| assume that the reference to _" in the 1950s"_ is an assumption
| made by the author of the blog based on when the article was
| published, and does not cast any doubt on the timeline.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060507100625/http://www.americ...
| hyperpape wrote:
| His book appears to have been published in 1942 or earlier:
| https://time.com/archive/6786636/books-biography-in-
| pictures....
| qingcharles wrote:
| I uploaded the book here, I can't find that quote or the
| photo in it, though:
|
| https://transfer.it/t/wCLoeh9XEZrZ
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Here's the link mentioned in the article:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090107061334/http://www.americ...
|
| Apparently she was 4 at the time and lived next door:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Roosevelt#Childhood
| haroldp wrote:
| In one of TR's books (perhaps Rough Riders?), he mentions
| watching Lincoln's funeral precession as a child, from his
| family home in New York.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Who is she referring to as "that horrible man"?
| cdot2 wrote:
| The grandfather who's house they were in.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Gotcha, I couldn't tell if it was Grandpa or one of the bros
| who locked her in the closet
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Presumably Cornelius Roosevelt.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The past is so much closer than you think. We are only three
| human lifetimes away from the American Revolution. The last
| living _children_ of American slaves were around into the 2010s.
| Back to Teddy, the last living person who could have met him was
| still around in the 2000s as well, meaning in your lifetime you
| could have talked to someone who knew someone who saw Abe Lincoln
| alive.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Indeed this is one of the things I most enjoyed when I first
| visited DC, the realization of just how recent these historical
| events really were. Standing on a battlefield in Gettysburg and
| thinking "This all happened in the 1860s, barely more than 100
| years before I was born. I have relatives who lived in this
| area at that time, and only a few generations back."
|
| When I talk to young people today, and realize how little they
| know about people and events that were major news when I was
| young, I understand how it happens. Even for me WW2 is just
| something from the history books, and yet it concluded just ~30
| years before I was born. 30 years before today was 1996.
|
| Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of
| imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be
| just something from a history book. Just imagine what it would
| be like today if we could see videos of George Washington and
| Abraham Lincoln, etc. Might knock the mythology down a peg or
| two, though.
| lukan wrote:
| "Our descendants are going to enjoy an enormous wealth of
| imagery and videos for events that will to them otherwise be
| just something from a history book. "
|
| The question will be at some point, will they be able to tell
| it apart from AI generated fake ones? (and will they care?)
|
| Already now youtube recommends me some obvious AI generated
| garbage as WW2 documentations. And that was just garbage
| generated for attention (ad money). Once big actors with
| money want to rewrite history and flood the web with fake
| images to spread certain narratives, then new challenges will
| arise.
|
| I hope enough people still care about facts and guard them.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| It's the "if you think the news is all lies, bullshit and
| agendas you should see the history books" meme.
|
| Lord knows what falsehoods of today will become the
| official record of tomorrow never mind what lies of the
| past we just repeat because they're what got written down.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's a good point. When I wrote my comment only my
| optimistic side was engaged ;-). The pessimistic side
| shares your concerns. I hope that we develop some
| technologically diffult-to-overcome solutions for
| preserving the integrity of media. Like methods for
| cryptographically signing raw content from a digital camera
| that guarantees it was produced by that hardware. Not a
| panacea, but a step in the right direction I think.
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/
| bena wrote:
| Lincoln died in 1865. If you were born in the 50s, there's a
| chance. But most people don't live to 90.
|
| For me, that person would be 115 when I was born for our lives
| to overlap.
|
| Yes, history is closer than we think, but it still moves on
| alanbernstein wrote:
| And yet, anything beyond one lifetime is entirely out of
| reach...
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Weird thought: someone born in the 1800s was (most likely)
| alive when the first transformer model ran.
|
| Emma Morano died April 15, 2017, the NIPS submission deadline
| for "Attention Is All You Need" was May 19, and a Wired article
| indicates they were testing models for quite a few weeks before
| then.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Jason Kottke occasionally uses the term The Great Span over at
| his blog on similar musings:
| https://kottke.org/tag/The%20Great%20Span
|
| I think his post that really got me was the 2021 headline, The
| Last Documented Widow of a Civil War Veteran Has Died:
| https://kottke.org/21/01/the-last-documented-widow-of-a-civi...
| bmitc wrote:
| That's a pretty extreme case that shifts the data by 70
| years.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The last Civil War soldier died in 1956.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Last Civil War died in 2020:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_.
| ..
| fortran77 wrote:
| I've had conversations with people born in the 19th, 20th, and
| 21st centuries!
| fortran77 wrote:
| "Last Witness to President Abraham Lincoln Assassination on
| 'I've Got A Secret' Television Show"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
| jej_FundAlign wrote:
| OK, thats enough proof for me that we are in a simulation. LOL
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _This image shows a close-up of the second story window (Courtesy
| the New York Times)_
|
| A 'close up' that is smaller and lower resolution than the main
| photo on the article, which is courtesy of the NY public library.
| NY Times isn't mentioned in the text at all. Is this entire
| article an LLM hallucination?
| landl0rd wrote:
| It dates to 2010. It's not any part LLM hallucination.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Is this entire article an LLM hallucination?
|
| An article at the National Archives written in 2010? That would
| be remarkable.
| m463 wrote:
| Along not-that-similar lines, I used to have a lincoln kennedy
| penny.
|
| It came with a card full of abe lincoln vs john f kennedy
| coincidences.
|
| (I wonder if I still have it somewhere?)
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lincoln+kennedy+penny+card&iar=ima...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coinci...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-17 23:01 UTC)