Dudleys Diary

and after searching for several hours was rewarded with this image. It is Dudley's Great Grandfather, Iver K. Poulsen whom Dudley had heard about but until last night, had no idea what he looked like. This is Dudley's paternal Great Grandfather. Best as I can determine, he was born in 1846 along the western coastal area of Denmark. From some information provided by my Grandfather, I know as a young man he had two choices at that time to earn a living. The choices were to be a sailor or a farmer. He elected the sea and on his first voyage, the sailing ship he was on became grounded on a sandbar during a fierce storm and he and his ship mates were in fear of losing their lives. they were saved when a rogue wave lifted their wooden ship up off the sandbar and into deeper waters saving their lives. After that experience he went back home and studied to be a Lutheran Missionary. Upon completing his studies, he got married to Dudley's Great Grandmother, Henrietta and they went to India where they worked in the Mission Field for close to twenty years. They had to deal with some pretty difficult living conditions. There were a myriad of diseases, wild tigers, Cobras and tsunamis, cyclones, and hurricanes. There were a lot of spiders and ants and other insects to deal with not to mention the oppressive heat in the jungle. They managed to survive all of that somehow. Upon completing his work in India, Iver K and his wife and children went back to Denmark for a number of years. In 1893 the family boarded a boat and headed to the United States of America! The boat landed in Portland Maine that same year and shortly after arriving in the US, Dudley's grandfather was born, the youngest of 9 brothers and sisters and the only one born on US soil. They stayed in Portland for a time and then moved to Chicago IL living in the Humbolt Park area. Iver K. was a pastor of a Lutheran church until his death at the age of 67 in 1913. Dudley's grandfather had the good sense to come to Texas in the 1920's where he met and married an East Texas girl as did Dudley some sixty years later. Last night when Dudley found the image of his Great Grandfather and gazed upon it for the first time, a wave of emotion swept over him. A long lost link to Dudley's past had finally been revealed.