Who he is. John H. Dudley married Lydia Jane Voudy of York in 1840. Their daughter Mary Catherine married Edward Schmidt in 1861 — so he is the grandfather of the Schmidt children, and the reason the Dudley, Voudy and Booker families are in this story at all.
Where. York, then Kittery — with two years of his twenties spent at the edge of the Antarctic ice.
The only place in the world that records the day John H. Dudley was born is the inside cover of a sealing schooner's notebook.
Somebody aboard — the man keeping the memorandum book — ruled two watch lists and headed one column, simply, Born. Against the men of the larboard watch, in a clear hand:
John Dudley ..... June 15. 1806.
No church register has him. No town book has him. No state or federal record of any kind gives him a birthday. A shipmate wrote it down at sea, and that is the whole of it.
Set against that single line, the paper record offers six different birth years for him — 1804, 1805, 1807, 1810, 1812, and the seventy-five or seventy-six he was said to be at death.
Not one of them has been read at an original image. Four are index entries. Two are transcriptions of a gravestone.
⚑ And the two stone readings may not even be independent of each other. The 1980 cemetery survey card has its source line filled in "Kittery Record Book, Frost" — on a printed form that states plainly "blank space means from grave stones." That card was copied out of a book, not read off the monument. The published 1996 transcription and the burial index may descend from the same single reading. Where the stone itself has since been photographed, it has already corrected the published version on another line.
The watch list is the only record of his birth written by somebody who was standing next to him.
In September 1829 a Portsmouth shipbuilder named George Raynes launched a schooner of sixty-eight tons called the Pacific. She was launched on 12 September 1829 for the merchants Pray & Neal, and held in a hundred and twenty shares of fifty dollars each — an ordinary town's worth of small investors betting on one hull.
She was bound for the Cape Verde Islands, and from there to South Georgia — a sub-Antarctic island in the far South Atlantic, most of it under ice — on a sealing voyage.
Fourteen men went. The memorandum book names them all: James Brown master, William Prince mate, then Benning Willey, Amos Chick, Morris Ham, John Dudley, Samuel Somerby, John Rackley, Joseph W. Pickering, Henry T. Curtis, James M. Lock, Joseph B. Currier, Ammi R. H. Fernald, and Oliver Potter the cook.
She was gone two years.
Think about what that is. A sixty-eight-ton schooner — smaller than many a modern fishing boat — sailing from New Hampshire to the Cape Verdes, then south across the equator and on to an island at the edge of the ice, to kill seals for their skins and oil, and back. He was twenty-three when she sailed and twenty-five when she came home.
⚑ And on 4 September 2026 the owners' own account book was opened. The Pray & Neal ledger at the Portsmouth Athenaeum — MS132 volume VI — carries at folio 67 an opening headed Dr. Men on Board the Sch.r Pacific. Cr., with one ruled account to each of ten crewmen, settled in the months after she came home. John Dudley's reads: To Stock 345 .. 3,00 | 1831 June By Stock 441 .. 1.62 | July By Cash .. 3,00. ⛔ That three dollars is not what the voyage paid him and must not be read as wages — James Brown, who commanded her, foots at $3.50, and no master earned three dollars fifty for two years in the South Atlantic. These are the balances left owing after stock, merchandise and cash advances. Nine of the ten men match the logbook's crew list.
He came home from the bottom of the world, married Lydia Jane Voudy, and settled at Kittery. Their daughter Mary Catherine was born in 1840 and married a German immigrant named Schmidt in 1861.
And then nothing at all is written about him for fifty years — until two newspapers print almost the same paragraph in September 1881:
John Dudley, an old and esteemed resident of Kittery, died Thursday, aged 76 years. He was the last survivor but one of the crew of the once famous schooner Pacific, which went on the only sealing voyage to the South Atlantic ever made by a Portsmouth vessel, being absent two years.
The Boston Post carried it with the date: died 15 September 1881. The Lewiston paper said "died Thursday" — and 15 September 1881 was a Thursday. Two papers, one date, internally consistent.
⭐ Fifty years after the voyage, that was still the thing worth saying about him. Not whose son he was. Not what he owned. Which ship he had been on.
This project has looked for John H. Dudley almost everywhere a man of his time and place can be looked for, and in the records that name owners he is not there. He is not absent from the record altogether. A full-text search turned up a John Dudley of York sued in the Supreme Judicial Court in 1859 and defaulted at the January term of 1860. That he is our man is strong evidence rather than proof — the entry gives no father, no age and no wife, and the identification has been argued four ways in this file. What is documented, and not in doubt, is the absence itself: he is not in the paper that records property, and that is the fact about him.
There is no land. The York County registry's Dudley grantor block was read in full at 400 dpi, and the grantee block independently after it. Across a hundred and twenty-five years of records — 1760 to 1885 — there is no John H. Dudley. He never bought, sold or mortgaged real estate in this county under his own name. (The one plain "John Dudley" in the whole block turns out, in the deed itself, to be a man of Waterborough.)
There is no probate. Every Dudley probate case in York County for two centuries — fifteen card numbers, eighteen cards — was transcribed in full. He is not among them. He left no will and no administration.
His marriage, on the other hand, is recorded — and this project spent weeks looking for it in the wrong places. The York town book has it, and it has been read at the image:
Mr. John Dudley a resident in York and Miss Lydia Jane Voudy of York intend marriage. Entered June 3d. 1840. Certificate issued June 17, 1840.**
⚑ It was published at York — not Kittery, not Portsmouth. Searches of the Kittery intentions, the New Hampshire State Archives and every FamilySearch index all came back empty and all of them were true, because the record is a York publishment that lives in print rather than in an index. (It also fixes the year: 1840, not the 1839 carried down from a 1919 lineage application.)
⚠ What it does not do is name anybody's parents. Maine intentions of this period give residence and style, not parentage. So it settles where and when they married, and it does not settle who Lydia's father was.
There is no 1840 household. No Dudley household appears at York that year at all.
And there is no death record. Kittery's death register does not begin until January 1883. He died in September 1881 — eighteen months too early to be written down.
Even his birthplace is contested by his own children. Two of his daughters' death certificates name their father's birthplace and they do not agree — one says York, the other Kittery. The one instrument that would settle it is a Seaman's Protection Certificate, which records a mariner's own sworn statement of his age and where he was born. The project has confirmed at the image that the registers of that period really do carry those columns. It has not found him in one.
For a long time this project treated that list as separate research failures. It is not. Read together, the four holes describe one man quite precisely.
He was a career mariner, and his wife held the property.
That is not a guess. Lydia J. Dudley bought the Kittery acre in her own name in 1873. When the house burned on the morning of 28 October 1880, three newspapers reported it and every one of them named Lydia J. Dudley as the owner — not one mentioned a husband. And when that acre was finally sold in 1883, the grantors were the widow and her two sons.
He owned nothing in his own name because she owned it in hers. A man at sea for months at a time does not sign deeds, and does not need to. The absence in the land records is not a gap in the evidence — it is the evidence.
A man with a common surname and no paper of his own attracts wrong answers, and this project has spent real time killing them. Every one of these was chased and eliminated, and each is recorded as a negative rather than quietly dropped: a birth at Orono on 29 February 1804 that looked like a perfect fit, until the second John H. Dudley it belongs to was identified outright — a real man who died at Bangor on 25 December 1864; a Gilman Dudley and Joanna Gilman parentage, closed on the printed record itself — the genealogy gives the son it proposed as John Hancock Dudley, born 7 September 1821, and says he "m. and lives at Moscow, Wis.": fifteen years younger than ours, in another state, and not in the 1880 census of Moscow at all; a Joanna Dudley keeping house in Boston who turned out to be Johanna (Woods) Dudley of Nashua, wife of a James Dudley of Lynn, and no relation at all; a family at Salisbury, Massachusetts, where a controlled search showed there was no resident Dudley family to 1849; a Dudley who died of smallpox at South Abington, cleared in five minutes; William H. Dudley's 1889 death certificate worked as a parentage route and returning nothing; and the Isles of Shoals, where four hundred and nine register entries were each searched for the name and there is no Dudley on those islands at all. One more had to be untangled rather than dismissed: William H. Dudley is a second, real man of the same generation at Kittery — not John H. misindexed. And the two of them were not strangers. The court record is explicit: on 6 August 1858, at Kittery, a John Dudley of York gave William H. Dudley his note for forty-eight dollars and eighty-two cents, and William H. endorsed it away the same day to the man who later sued on it. The transaction is documented. That its maker is our John H. is strong evidence, not proof. Whether the two men were brothers is still not proved. But they were doing business.
One candidate for his father survives all of it. On 7 November 1803, William Dudley married Caty Amee at Kittery — the year before the earliest of the competing birth years. And the census is unusually helpful here: William Dudley is the only Dudley household at Kittery in 1820 and in 1830, and his second wife Hannah heads the only one in 1840. One family, one town.
⚠ It is not proof and this project does not treat it as such. No record yet found names John H. as William's son. And there is a real problem sitting on top of it: the Kittery intentions for the autumn of 1803 were read at the image and they are continuous and complete — and there is no intention of marriage for William Dudley and Caty Amee among them.
Beside him stand two probable siblings of the same generation at Kittery: William H. Dudley, who died on 3 December 1889 aged eighty-six, and Mary Ann Dudley, who entered an intention with Samuel Fry on 28 February 1829, "both of Kittery."
He is one date, one ship and one sentence.
Born 15 June 1806, on the authority of a shipmate. Aboard the Pacific for two years at the edge of the ice. Dead on 15 September 1881, remembered in two newspapers for a voyage he had made half a century earlier.
Everything else about him is a hole with a shape — and the shape is a man who spent his life on the water, put nothing in his own name, and let his wife hold the ground.
His daughter married Edward Schmidt at York in 1861, and this family comes down from that. Which means the whole line runs through a man who left almost no trace of himself at all.
This is research in motion, and this is where it stands today. Below, what the documents actually say is separated from what the evidence strongly suggests and from what nobody has found at all.
M-12, M-13, M-04, M-05, N-01, F-43, D-46, D-66, PR-DUD2, F-17, C-27, C-14, C-10, D-44, N-02, D-43, V-30, V-41, V-88, C-18, G-25, X-ORONO, X-GILMANTEST, X-GILMANMAINE, X-WMHD, X-WMHD-NEG, B-15, B-16, B-19, V-11, B-11, B-12, B-14, G-08, F-94, X-KITCEM-ALL, M-09, V-35, F-28, X-WMALIAS, F-95, V-82, CT-05, F-110, F-111, X-MOSCOWTEST, M-27, M-28, M-30.p04-john-dudley.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py