(above) The first known photo – a tintype – of Grandpa Peter Kladstrup, about 1885.

To see a legend become real is a special privilege, but that is what happened to me.

Grandpa Kladstrup was sitting calmly by the picture window in his home when told his brother had died. “Don’t worry, I’m okay,” he said, and then he smiled sadly. “I already knew. The dove came for me.”

Outside the window in a young oak tree, a white dove sat unmoving, seemingly looking straight at Grandpa as he told me the story of the white dove who had come to comfort his own father when his youngest child - Grandpa’s baby brother - died of diphtheria. His father was convulsed with grief and threw himself on the ground, crying uncontrollably. There he lay until a white dove descended, landing beside him and staying there until he finally was able to stop the tears. “Never kill or harm a white dove,” his father said afterward. “It is the only thing that brought me peace.”

Grandpa Kladstrup’s story seemed more fantasy than reality, but it started me on a quest to try to “prove” the family legend was real. I wanted it to be something more than a bit of lore that kept the old folks nodding their heads and the younger generation rolling its eyes. I began talking to the oldest family members and traced the story back to its first telling. It led me through Kladstrup family history, an encounter with General Custer on his way to his “last stand,” heartbreak and then a romance almost too dramatic and daring to be true, settling in Iowa and creating a farm in mosquito-infested swampy land, and then to that devastating loss of a child.

The Kladstrup farm on Kladstrup Way. From here, Peder Kladstrup left for America where he would first meet the white dove.

(right) A Kladstrup on Kladstrup Way in Denmark.

Family history also led us on a trip to Denmark and a stroll down “Kladstrup Way” to where the farm house that housed generations of Danish-speaking Kladstrups once stood. One young man from that house had bravely traveled down “Kladstrup Way” and continued on, not knowing what awaited him in the United States where he would begin a family and a new life in a new language.

Today’s Kladstrups speak English, they sing it, they write it, sometimes incorporating a word or two of the Danish their ancestors spoke.

Their story and the story of the bird that lives in their hearts is what In the Presence of Forever is all about. The legend is real.

Peder and Mette Kladstrup in about 1900.