Finding Our Way Home: Armenian Genealogy Conference Returns to Watertown for 10th Anniversary

The conference traveled to the University of Michigan-Dearborn in Detroit in 2017, followed by Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, in June 2018 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in November 2018. In November 2019, the conference reached the West Coast with a gathering at the Mesrobian School in Pico Rivera, California. After the interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference achieved another milestone in September 2022 when it was held for the first time in Yerevan, Armenia, at the American University of Armenia.

Now, a decade after that first Watertown gathering, the conference is coming home.

From Immigration Records to Ottoman Photographs

The November 21 program will reflect how dramatically Armenian genealogical research has expanded during the past decade.

Mark Arslan, one of the pioneers of Armenian genealogy in the United States and creator of both the Armenian DNA Project and Armenian Immigration Project, will focus on immigration and naturalization records.

Arslan began researching his own Armenian ancestry in 1971 and has since assembled an extraordinary database of primary-source information relating to Armenian immigration to North America before 1930. His work demonstrates how passenger manifests, naturalization files and other seemingly ordinary government records can reveal places of origin, relatives, migration patterns and connections that disappeared from family memory generations ago.

Greg Jundanian and Lisa Misakian will introduce participants to the Armenians of Whitinsville Project, an ambitious effort to preserve the history of one of Massachusetts’ most significant historic Armenian communities.

The project brings together photographs, documents, oral histories, recipes, recordings and family stories to reconstruct not merely individual genealogies, but the life of an entire Armenian-American community. Its approach offers a model that could be duplicated in Armenian communities throughout the diaspora—transforming genealogy from a collection of names and dates into a record of how families actually lived.

One of the conference’s most unusual presentations will come from Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders.

Gürsel’s research uncovered an extraordinary collection of photographs in the Ottoman archives documenting Armenian emigration around the turn of the 20th century. Beginning in 1896, Armenians who received permission to leave the Ottoman Empire were required under certain circumstances to renounce their Ottoman nationality and agree never to return. Photography became part of that process.

Thousands of Armenian emigrants were photographed, leaving behind images that today represent an extraordinary genealogical and historical resource. Gürsel’s research follows these photographs beyond the Ottoman archives, connecting the faces captured more than a century ago with immigration documents, American records and, in some instances, the descendants of the people pictured.

For anyone who has ever stared at an unidentified photograph of a great-grandparent and wondered what story it might contain, Gürsel’s work illustrates the remarkable possibilities created when photographs and archival records are brought together.

Armenian Genealogy in France

The conference will also expand its geographic reach through a presentation by Boghos Tchitchekdjian on Armenian genealogy in France and the work of RIGA — Relais International de Généalogie Arménienne, or the International Relay of Armenian Genealogy.

Founded in France in 2020, RIGA has sought to overcome some of the particular obstacles confronting Armenian genealogists: records scattered among different archives and countries, multiple migration routes, changing surnames and the adaptation or Frenchification of Armenian family names. Its broader goal is to identify, compile and make Armenian genealogical resources more accessible.

The presentation will be particularly valuable for families whose relatives passed through or settled in France, but it will also demonstrate the increasingly international nature of Armenian genealogical research.

DNA and the Expanding Universe of Armenian Records

Other presentations will explore DNA testing and the growing array of resources available to Armenians researching their family histories.

For Armenian genealogists, DNA can be especially powerful. The Armenian Genocide, forced conversion, deportation, orphaning, adoption and migration frequently severed the documentary trail between generations. DNA testing can sometimes bridge those gaps, identify previously unknown relatives and provide evidence supporting relationships that cannot be established through surviving documents alone.

The conference will examine how genealogists can use DNA effectively while also exploring archival and online resources that have become increasingly available.

The changes since the first conference in 2016 have been remarkable. Records once accessible only by traveling to an archive may now be digitized. Databases can connect names appearing in immigration manifests, census documents, church registers and naturalization petitions. Online collections can reconstruct the life of an Armenian village or diaspora community. Photographs once hidden in government archives can identify emigrating families. DNA matches can connect descendants living on different continents.

Yet technology alone cannot reconstruct a family.

Successful genealogy still begins with people—with grandparents’ stories, the inscription on the back of a photograph, an unfamiliar village name written on a naturalization form, the maiden name that everyone almost forgot, or the distant cousin who remembers one detail that unlocks everything else.

That is why gathering genealogists together remains so important.

More than a Conference

The November 21 gathering is intended not simply as a day of lectures, but as an opportunity for participants to meet others engaged in the same search.

Some of the most valuable discoveries at earlier conferences have come through conversations between presentations: discovering that another attendee’s family came from the same village, meeting someone researching the same surname, learning about an archive one did not know existed, or finding someone who can read a document that has sat untranslated in a family collection for decades.

That opportunity will continue after the formal program with a dinner featuring Armenian music, giving participants, speakers and researchers additional time to meet, exchange information and build connections.

The cost has deliberately been kept accessible:

Conference, including lunch: $25
Dinner with Armenian music: $40
Conference, lunch and dinner: $65

For an entire day devoted to uncovering generations of family history, it may prove to be a remarkably valuable investment.

Ten years after Armenian genealogy enthusiasts first filled the ACEC in Watertown, they will return with tools and resources that could scarcely have been imagined at that first gathering.

But the fundamental question remains unchanged: Who were the people who came before us?

For Armenians, answering that question is about more than constructing a family tree. It is an act of recovery. It reconnects families fractured by genocide and migration, restores names to people who might otherwise be forgotten and preserves stories for generations who have yet to hear them.

On November 21, hundreds of those individual searches will once again come together in Watertown.

Bring your questions. Bring your family names. Bring the village name no one quite knows how to spell. Bring the photograph whose faces you cannot identify.

You may leave knowing more about where — and who — you came from.