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Court records place Thomas Lincoln in Kentucky from 1786 to 1816. There is no evidence of his having ever been in NC and little known reason for him to have gone there. We also know Nancy Hanks was in Kentucky in 1806, when she married Thomas Lincoln. Moreover, a discrepancy of 5 years in Lincoln's age would surely have been noticed. While Abraham Lincoln's relations with his father were strained. One doesn't have to attribute this incompatibility to illegitimacy. More here.

Lincoln did speculate about his origins. But he suspected that his mother might have been an offshoot of one of the First Families of Virginia. Curiously, he apparently did not know that his ancestors had been locally prominent, successful farmers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia before moving westward and returning to nature as frontiersmen.

And interestingly, one of the big promoters of the Enlow theory today is an Enlow descendant. Disprove the theory and it gets attached to another Enlow, Inlow or Enlows.