As the self-appointed family historian, this project has taken me to places around the world and to truly know the personalities of my grandparents. Why the decisions that formed their lives and ultimately mine. The stories handed down have been twisted in ways that I did not understand and this project has got the facts right. By that I mean, that by reading the letters left to me from the 1930s it all starts to make sense and placed in order of events now known.
My Grandmother Else Halmoe Dohm was a very farsighted person. I knew her for 18 years and yet did not really know anything about her and my grandfather Peter. Things like in one letter I read, she writes to the family friend about life on the little boat but then asks for these letters to be saved so that in the future they will bring back so many wonderful memories. In another one she writes that the sailing trip around the world is taking so long that it may only be completed by her children and grandchildren or even her GREAT Grandchildren in 2005 and this she wrote in 1936!
The Letters she wrote and saved the photos that were passed down to me the newspaper clippings that survived all this time have taken on a new life as I translate, copy and sort for my GREAT grandchildren.
And on the subject of translate; I need to give a BIG thank you to a family friend, Trudi Torinus who in the 1970s took the time to read and translate from handwritten Danish and German with some help from my mother to read Danish, Typed over a 100 pages on a old style typewriter but then saved it all for me to put in this form so that you may read the stories also.
So from the pages of the letters and logbooks of the little sailboat “Restmore” I hope you will enjoy the work that I have done in honor of the family name. It was started in 1985 with me getting entrusted with the old family photos and wanting to save them from harm.
Hans H Dohm, grandson of Peter & Else Dohm
