Family history/related to President Lincoln and history of portrait photography: The author’s grandfather, Frederick Hill Meserve, bought sight unseen at an auction in the late 19th century a package containing one hundred photographic salt prints. Included were two portraits of General Robert E. Lee. Meserve was hooked. By the end of his many years of amassing historic portrait photographs, his collection included ten negatives of Abraham Lincoln that Matthew B. Brady had taken from life, including two stereoscopic pairs. In 1911 Meserve privately printed The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln, which featured one hundred photographs of our sixteenth president. Eventually the book was supplemented with an additional twenty-four Lincoln photographic portraits. Daniel Chester French relied on Meserve’s photographs of Lincoln to sculpt the seated statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., as did Gutzon Borglum for Mount Rushmore. Carl Sandburg and Charles Keck were among the collector’s many friends. Meserve also published a 28-volume set of historic portraits with 8,000 photos of 6,000 people and places, all painstakingly identified and described. The Meserve collection of photographs now is broken up and housed in the Smithsonian Institution, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Chicago Historical Society, and other locations.