Roger Hagopian’s Love of History Near and Far Has Led to Series of Documentaries

April 9, 2026

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LEXINGTON, Mass. — Roger Hagopian is both interesting and interested. He has a deep-rooted love for the history of his home state as well as the reasons his Armenian ancestors fled Western Armenia for these shores. And he shows his love by making short documentaries about them.

In a recent interview, the soft-spoken Hagopian discussed his completed works, as well as another one that is in the pipeline.

Hagopian has tried his hand at many things. He has taught music therapy at the now defunct Protestant Guild for the Blind. He also did a spell at the Fernald School in Waltham, where two teachers there taught him how to instruct the visually impaired.

He also is the owner and operator of Roger Hagopian Carpet Cleaning, a service where he comes to customers’ homes to clean rugs or upholstery.

Hagopian, 76, recalled that growing up in Codman Square, Dorchester, in Boston, he was part of a large Armenian immigrant community. It was at the public library there that his passion for history, especially the fine print, and depicting it through the arts was born.

“They were scattered about. The Codman Square Public Library was in a community that was declining. I fell in love with American history when I was probably in the second grade. I used to do art work on the American Revolution and the historic buildings of Boston. By the time I was in the fourth grade, I was doing murals in my school hallway of all the historic buildings. I wanted to see every one of them and know their role in the American revolution,” he recalled.

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“I liked the idea of reading about them, but then I wanted to see them. I would drag my grandmother, who lived in the same house,” a three-decker, to see all the local sites he had read about in books.

Hagopian’s family has deep roots in the US.

His maternal grandfather came to the US before the Genocide. “We think he lost his parents during the Hamidian massacres,” he recalled.

On his father’s side, his grandmother’s brother was sent to the US because all the adult men in the family in Van had been massacred.

His mother’s family in Marash was also similarly affected.

“According to my mother’s sister, she was told that their father had witnessed his parents being killed in front of him. He and his brother escaped. One brother went to Brazil and the other came to Boston,” he said. He was a shoemaker from Marash and plied his trade in Boston.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

Topics: film

People: Myron Allukian Jr., Roger Hagopian

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One grandmother marched in February 1920 for three days with the orphans. While she was not an orphan, she had been visiting a friend in the orphanage. When the French left Cilicia and she couldn’t get back to her family, she had to march with the rest of them.

Joining them was Dr. Mabel Elliott, a British-born American physician who did post-war medical relief work in Turkey, Armenia, and Greece from 1919 to 1923. In fact, Hagopian wrote the introduction for her biography, Unbreakable Healer: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Mabel E. Elliott by G.L. Pedersen.

Cover of Unbreakable Healer: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Mabel E. Elliott, for which Hagopian wrote the introduction

His grandmother marched for three days to Islahiyeh whence she boarded the train for Adana.

“They shipped them from Adana by train to Aleppo,” and then went to Cyprus where she worked for a Greek family. After that, she ended up in Marseille, not an uncommon destination.

“On both sides of my family, the young men were sent ahead to America. They established themselves,” he said. “This was fear. My grandmother’s brother, Johana Parsekian, was beaten by the Turks, so they decided they better send him.”

At age 49, Hagopian said he got a wakeup call to delve into and preserve his family’s story.

While “it’s terrible stuff, the process is fun,” he said.

Thus his first film, “Journey of an Armenian Family,” was born.

He completed another one in 2002 based on family history and the Armenian Genocide, “Memories of Marash, The Legacy of a Lost Armenian Community.” The 67-minute documentary explores the Armenian way of life of the city, a cultural, religious, commercial, and educational center located in present day Turkey, culminating in the series of massacres from the late 1800s to 1923 and the final expulsion of that populace during the Armenian Genocide.

From the Armenian documentaries, he has pivoted to American history and preservation. In 1992, he joined an American historical preservation group, called the Middlesex Canal Association.

“The Middlesex Canal was the Big Dig of its era,” he said, noting that it took place from 1803 to 1853.

The canals, created to move products down lumber and granite from New Hampshire, were elevated in many spots to go over roadways. “I was just fascinated that they did this before railroads,” he said.

He is currently working on an HD version of the film, which was produced by David Medzorian.

Inspired by Medzorian, he decided he needed to learn how to work a film from start to finish and ended up working at the local community cable access office.

He decided the time was right to work on his family’s story, especially with his father receiving a cancer diagnosis.

“I don’t know what drove me. This whole topic and the Armenian heritage pulled me into doing things I never dreamed of doing. It was like a magnet,” he said.

“Once I finished it, I thought I want to do more of it,” he recalled.

After that, he did a documentary on Armenian-American World War II veterans, titled “Our Boys,” for the Armenian Memorial Church.

Next he did the documentary on the Hood Rubber Plant, titled “Destination Watertown.” The documentary seemed to appeal to many non-Armenians whose ancestors had worked at the massive plant in Watertown in the mid part of the 20^th century. He noted, “When I was showing the Hood Rubber film, a lot of Italians came,” he noted.

Currently he is working on a film on Armenian-American Vietnam veterans. The idea for the film started with a friend of his, Art Nerssessian, a disabled Vietnam veteran. However, when he connected with Dr. Myron Allukian that propelled the story.

“I probably photographed over 100 photographs [that Allukian had taken] of Vietnam,” he said. Allukian was a medic during the war. He was a dentist, joined the navy, switched to the marines, and was there in 1965 for the invasion of Vietnam, in Danang.

Myron Allukian with Vietnamese children during the Viet Nam War, to whom he provided free dental service

“They were surrounded by Agent Orange,” he said.

Allukian is a longtime instructor at Harvard. He was the first dentist to receive the Sedgwick Medal for Distinguished Service in Public Health, American Public Health Association’s highest award, and has an Honorary Fellowship in the Royal Society of Health of Great Britain.

“He had to decide who can live and who can die,” Hagopian said of Allukian. The stress and trauma left him exhausted and still, in the afternoon, he and a few others got in their jeep and went to the Vietnamese villagers and worked on the kids’ teeth.

These stories, Hagopian said, “kill me,” but between his “heritage and faith,” he finds the strength to push through.

Other folks part of the planned documentary are veteran Manoog Kaprielian and Prof. Henry Theriault, a historian of Vietnam. While Theriault was too young to serve in the war, his father was a veteran of that war.

“I would love to have live screenings where people can come up and attend. I would like to show it to veterans groups and they don’t have to be Armenian,” he noted.

Hagopian said he is hoping to have it ready for the fall.

“My motivation to do this is the fact that I could have been taken to serve in the Vietnam war but wasn’t,’” he said. “It’s a way of me reconciling the fact that some people went and I didn’t go. I feel this group of people that served our country at that time, with the war … they had one order for 206,000 soldiers. Just the morality of this war and the idea of trying to make a democracy of Vietnam.”

To view his films on YouTube, visit https://www.youtube.com/@rogerhagopian4275.