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!

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.

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

Who is she referring to as "that horrible man"?

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.