Paul Harold Verduin

Paul Harold Verduin, of Silver Spring, Md., died on April 22, 2025. He was 79 when he succumbed to complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was preceded in death by his wife, Rose Allison, in 2020. He is survived by a son, Jacob, and sisters Kathleen Verduin of Holland, Mich.; Eileen (Chris) Raphael of Saugatuck, Mich.; Marilyn (John) Paarlberg of Loudonville, N. Y.; and his dear friend, Donna Towns of Silver Spring, Md.

Raised on a farm near Chicago Hts., Ill., he was the second of four children of Harold and Gerarda (Bottema) Verduin. He attended a Christian school in South Holland, Ill., and graduated from Bloom Township High School in Chicago Heights, where he refined his singing talents and developed a deep appreciation for people of various backgrounds and faiths. He received a B. A., with a major in Psychology, from Hope College, Holland, Mich., in 1967. While there, he founded an independent fraternity, The Centurians, which continues today. After two years of study at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary, and New York Theological Seminary, he moved to Washington, D.C., subsequently relocating to suburban Maryland. He married in 1979 and in 1982 earned an M.A. degree in Urban History from the University of Maryland.

Conversations with grandparents sowed seeds of a lifelong interest in genealogy, nourished by his adventures as a young man in ancestral provinces in the Netherlands. An alert researcher, he reconstructed a meticulous genealogy of the Verduin family, tracing it back to 1492. He presented his findings at a reunion in 2005, the 150th anniversary of the immigration of his great-great-grandparents to the United States. 

His experience in genealogical investigation led to a new fascination in 1986 when he was surprised to learn on a trip to Virginia that the birthplace, birth date, and father of Abraham Lincoln’s mother were uncertain. This led him to two years of archival research in five states as well as the National Archives in D.C. As an independent scholar, he published in 1988 an article on Lincoln’s maternal genealogy, and his research was noted in David Herbert Donald’s 1996 best-seller Lincoln. In 1997 he founded the Abraham Lincoln Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to scholarly research. From 1987 to 2005 he served as General Secretary of the Institute.

This project gave way to what would absorb his tireless attention for the years to come: ending the conflict in Israel-Palestine. He was chairman and co-founder of the Sabeel D.C. Metro, the Washington D.C. affiliate of Friends of Sabeel-North America. He was also active in Palestine-Israel justice-and-peace advocacy in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Peace Not Walls network, the Metro Washington D.C. Synod's Middle East Working Group, the National Capital Presbytery's Middle East Concerns Team, and the Israel Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) of the Presbyterian Church, the group responsible for successfully shepherding the landmark divestment overture through the Presbyterian General Assembly in June 2014. He made four peace-building trips to Israel-Palestine during 2008-2013, visiting religious and humanitarian groups in Israel and the West Bank. In 2016 he spoke at the Critical Issues Symposium at his alma mater, devoted that year to strategies for peace-making in Israel-Palestine. His hobbies included traveling across the United States and overseas, mainly in Europe and the Middle East. An avid gardener, he planted many trees and plants over the years at his home on Dartmouth Ave. A talented baritone singer, he loved to sing in church and the choir. A committed neighborhood advocate, he made sure that if any injustice happened in the neighborhood the local news media would know about it. Paul was a kind and gentle man who wasn’t afraid to take a stand against injustice when he saw it. He will be profoundly missed by many.

A memorial service is scheduled for 11:00 a.m. on May 24 at Bethesda Presbyterian Church, 7611 Clarendon Road, Bethesda, Md. Memorial gifts may be made in his memory to The Michael J. Fox Foundation (michaeljfox.org); Friends of Sabeel North America (fosna.org); or Friends of the Tent of Nations North America (fotonna.org).