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LOSING A HOME is a cruel thing, but life can be cruel-even to those destined for greatness.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a meager, one-room cabin on the Big South Fork on Nolin's Creek near Hodgenville, Kentuky. It had a dirt floor, one window and a stick-clay chimney. Lincoln's father, Tom had paid $200 for a cabin on 300 acres of discouranging land. It wasn't much, but it was home and the young family's only chance for a decent life.
After four years of fighting mosquitoes, heat and hardscrabble land, the Lincolns had to pack up and leave. There was a defect in the title. They didn't have the right sort of papers and somebody else had a better claim to the land. With three-year old Abe in his mother's arms, the family moved eight miles away to Knob Creek.
In less than four years, Tom Lincoln had to go to court to prove his ownership rights to his second farm. Another claimant to the land sued him as a "trespasser." Tom Lincoln won the suit, but was haunted by the fear that he might someday loose another property. There was enough talk of land-titles, landowners, landlords, land-laws, land-laywers and land-sharks to make him unsure of his title. After all, Daniel Boone, the first pioneer of the Kentucky wilderness, had lost every inch of his once vast landholdings because he had "the wrong kind of papers." Tom decided to move his family to Indiana where there was rich, black government land with clear title and the right kind of papers. Thus, Abraham Lincoln lost his second home to title problems. It was the anxiety and outright losses of the Lincolns and other hard-working Americans that gave rise to today's title insurance industry.
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