" There is a dim possibility that he is of the stock of the New England Lincolns, of Plymouth colony,” he wrote, “but the noble science of heraldry is almost obsolete in this country, and none of Mr. Lincoln’s family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees.” Later, in the White House, Lincoln checked Howells’s book out of the Library of Congress, in order to check "

― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States