As a kid, I remember visiting the “calendar store” that popped up in our local mall near the end of every year. While not as popular as the similarly seasonal Spirit Halloween or Santa Markplace-type stores, the calendar store was nonetheless a fun place to browse the wide variety of calendars designed to suit all tastes. 12 months of beach scenes? Check. Themed kitty cat photos? Check. Outhouses from around the world? Check. Almost any type of animal or location was represented in the calendar store. While the traditional 12 monthly calendars were no doubt the store’s bread and butter, this was not the limit of calendar technology. They had 16-month calendars for those who liked to plan far ahead, weekly calendars one could use as a planner with areas for notes, and small calendars that fit onto bookmarks. My favorite calendars were always the Day-to-Day calendars that had a tear-away page for each day. They were attached to plastic stands so that they stood up like a frame on your desk. As the year went by, you’d rip off one page a day, and your calendar would get thinner and thinner. Each year, I would select my day-to-day calendar for the upcoming year, regularly choosing between my favorite comic strips, Peanuts, Garfield, The Far Side, Foxtrot, etc. In addition to the daily fix of a comic strip, the best day-to-day calendars had word puzzles, riddles, or fun trivia on the back of each sheet. As I got older, I noticed that Saturday and Sunday started to share a single page and comic, which I always thought was a bit of a rip-off.
Whenever I would open my brand new day-to-day calendar, it took all my available willpower not to flip through it and read every page on that very first day. These were early lessons in self-control that I generally did pretty well with, although I would always jump ahead to my birthday and some holidays just to see what those days would have in store. These day-to-day calendars gave me something small to look forward to every day.
Several years ago, I had the idea to create my own day-to-day calendar relating not to my favorite comic strips but to my favorite historical subject: the assassination of Lincoln. An odd subject for a calendar, I admit, but not any stranger than others I’ve seen, like Museum Bums 2024. I thought how interesting it would be to assemble one event relating to Lincoln’s assassination or the Booth family for each day of the year. Maybe it could be something that I could even publish. I started the process of trying to find relevant facts. I soon discovered, however, how difficult such a project like this would be. After struggling to find a dozen or so facts and inputting them into a spreadsheet, I shelved the idea.
In the intervening years, two big changes occurred. First was the publication of Art Loux’s book John Wilkes Booth: Day By Day. Art spent his lifetime meticulously tracking and documenting Booth’s whereabouts. While it was impossible to say where Booth was every day of his life, his career as an actor made it possible to fill out most of his movements from 1860 onward. In many ways, Art’s book is like a day-to-day calendar themed around John Wilkes Booth, which is probably why I enjoy it so immensely.
The other big change was my move to upload my digital research files from just being on my one computer to a backup on the cloud. For years, I had been terrified a hard drive failure would cause me to lose every file I’d ever saved. As a result, I started uploading my files to the cloud. This also gave me the ability to access my files from my phone, no matter where I was. This greatly improved my ability to conduct research in the field. An unexpected side effect of uploading my files to the cloud was that they suddenly became searchable. The all-seeing cloud could decipher and read the text from many of the pictures I had uploaded. When I searched my cloud drive for a phrase or word, I found that I was no longer limited to only files I had given that name to. All the documents that the cloud could read and bore that word or phrase popped up in my search. The functionality of my research had increased immeasurably.
In August of 2021, I found myself tweeting about when John Wilkes Booth recruited his childhood friends Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen into his plot. It happened to be just around that day, so I used the common enough Twitter hashtag #OTD, which stands for On This Day or On This Date. The tweet got some good engagement, so the next day, I searched my cloud for that day and found a corresponding event among my files. I tweeted another #OTD tweet for that day. I followed suit on the third day as well. Soon, I discovered I had unintentionally reignited my project from years ago to create a day-to-day calendar of the Lincoln assassination. And now I was doing it on the fly, not spending months researching and preparing.
Each day, before bed, I would try to find an event that would work for the next day. When my own files failed to produce anything, I would fall back on Art’s book to locate a Booth-related event I could use. Some days were easy and provided many options. Other days were frustratingly difficult, and I struggled mightily to find something better than John Wilkes Booth performed in such a-such play. As a visual learner, it was also important to me that each event be supplemented with images of some kind. Often, I would work late into the night, finding an event and assembling relevant images to accompany it. On weekends, I would try to get ahead and prep multiple days if I could.
An example of one of my On This Day tweets
I had previously highlighted my daily tweets as weekly stand-alone posts here on the blog. However, since that time, Twitter has been bought, renamed, and had its accessibility severely curtailed. My tweets no longer load properly in my prior posts. In addition, Twitter has become increasingly toxic since the takeover by Lex Luther. I’ve decreased my activity on that platform as it gives way to increased bigotry and right-wing conspiracy-mongering. It is becoming completely unrecognizable from what it was, and I am not confident my years’ worth of content on that site will survive.
However, I did not want my day-to-day project to all be for naught. I made a mistake in assuming my work would be preserved long-term on Twitter. Therefore, I have painstakingly copied the text and pictures from each of my On This Day tweets and reproduced them as regular text and image slideshows. To house this project, I have created a new section here on LincolnConspirators.com. Twitter can continue to X itself into oblivion without me fearing the loss of over a year’s worth of work.
The On This Day section is the culmination of over a year of work researching and highlighting different events relating to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Boooh family for every day of the year. It is my own Lincoln Assassination Day-to-Day Calendar in a digital form.
In order to prevent an overload of 365+ mini-posts, I have attempted to hide each day under a collapsible list. Clicking a month on the list will reveal each day of the month. Clicking a specific day will reveal an event (or occasionally two) that occurred on that day in a certain year. Underneath the text is a slideshow of relevant images. I know it’s not the prettiest of lists, but I assure you that there are diamonds hidden beneath the surface if you don’t mind doing a little digging.
While each entry is hidden underneath the list, the page still attempts to load each entry’s slideshow when the page is first opened. As a result, some of the slideshows take longer to load completely, especially those in the latter part of the year. If you click on an entry and the slideshow is just a black screen, give it some time, and it should eventually load. I appreciate your patience.
It’s up to you how you want to use this calendar. You could come back and visit each day to read about an event on its anniversary or binge them all at once. I won’t judge. This list is static for now, but I have the idea of adding more events and facts in time. When that happens, I’ll make an announcement.
Click the Lincoln calendar image above or on this link to visit the On This Day page. There is also a new link on the top menu of the website to find the OTD page easily in the future.
I hope you enjoy delving into a whole year of Lincoln assassination and Booth family-related events.
LincolnConspirators.com 
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