Roger Cumberland
Roger C. Cumberland (1894–June 12, 1938) was a Presbyterian missionary who was killed while living in Duhok in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Cumberland was born in 1894 in La Verne, California. He served as a field artillery officer for a year between his junior and senior year of college, and enlisted to serve in the First World War in 1917, but the war ended before he was deployed. He graduated in 1919 from Occidental College in Los Angeles and then 1922 from McCormick Theological Seminary. He arrived in Iraq in April 1923 to work as a missionary. His work began with the East Persia Mission, from where he went to Mosul, and afterwards to Dohuk. His New York Times obituary noted that he "made long trips to the villages of tribesmen, lived with the people and established Christian centers among them." The United Mission in Mesopotamia was founded in 1924 by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the Reformed Church in America, and the Reformed Church in the United States. The mission had two schools: Baghdad High School Mansour, a girls' school in West Baghdad; and the School of High Hope, a boys' school in Basra. In the