The homesite CaddoTrees.com was created for my father’s Tyson Family Tree and this part of the site is for my mother’s Jensen Family Tree. My father’s family is from Louisiana and has long roots in America. My mother’s family was immigrants from Denmark & Lebanon so tracing down my lineage there has been a challenge to say the least. I don’t have near the info available here that I do for my Tyson history. We have no contact with any of my mother's family in either country. The only people I’ve ever met from her family are my grandparents and my mother’s siblings and children and one of my grandmother’s maternal aunts Rettebeh Hashim/Townsend (1883/1968) who was very old when she came to live with us in LA in the mid 1960’s when I was just a little boy, so I remember her but never got to know her. All my cousins have the same story; we’ve never met this side of the family, all we have is photos and some family lore. Thanks to ANCESTRY.COM I’ve been able to contact a few of our Lebanese cousins and that has been great but no luck on the Danish side as the name Jensen is so common that it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. My mother’s parents were Niels Peter Jensen (1897/1989) and Edna Helen Shoucair (1906/1979) and for most of my childhood they lived next door to us in a duplex in Los Angeles. We grew up eating about as international as it gets and I helped a few times chopping the mint and parsley for saf suf (tabouli) and we ate kibbe (traditional Lebanese lamb dish), Dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), lentils, fatayer (spinach pies) and baklava by the pound, mom can really “shake the pots” as they say.

The story I've heard is that my grandfather Niels came over from Denmark around 1920 stowed away on a boat. While docked in New York I guess he decided he wanted to stay in America and he deserted ship and moved around a bit working his way across the country. Niels was a big strong man and would stop at farms and bail hay and do odd jobs then move on. He ended up in Seattle for a while and worked at a dept. store and finally settled in Los Angeles. On August 1, 1922 Niels enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at Mare Island, California and was stationed on the USS California (known as the "Flagship of the Pacific") until at least 1925 from the records I've found. Niels parents were Lars Peter Jensen and Nielsane Joanne Petersen from Hjorring Denmark. Only one sibling that we know of Niels came to America to live and that was his brother William Edward Jensen (1895/1988) who settled in America and died in Oregon. My grandmother Edna was born in Seattle Washington and her family lived in Raymond, Pacific County WA. She was the daughter of Salim Khalil Shoucair (1873/1933) and Jamileh "Amelia" Hashim (1880/1954) both immigrants from around Beirut Lebanon. Grandma was one of the first Shoucair found born in the US in 1906 and Salim is also one of the first known Shoucair on record in Ellis Island and naturalization records. His first request for US citizenship is found in 1890 in Seattle WA and that’s the first document we have on him, he was naturalized in 1896 in Seattle. Salim and family moved from Raymond WA to Santa Monica in the early 1920's. Edna worked for many years at the big Library in downtown Los Angeles until they both retired and moved to Mexico.

Niels Peter Jensen met Edna Helen Shoucair in Santa Monica California around 1930, story is he would watch her swimming out in the ocean, grandma loved to swim and Niels would watch her and a love affair began. They were married for 46 years, Edna passed away first in 1979 and Niels in 1989.