Jennie Garabedian
In her interview, Jennie Garabedian described her childhood memories of the visits her mother would have with other women from the Armenian community: “the old ladies would get together, my mother and her friends…and they would talk and cry and talk and cry.” As a shy young girl, Garabedian spent a lot of time with her mother and the other women, listening to them as they shared stories and heartaches. Their recollections of the homeland helped Jennie, even as a child, understand what had been lost; she developed a fierce interest in visiting the homeland–so fierce that she later started her own travel agency to help people travel more easily.
It was during another meeting of Armenian women–this one taking place in 1982, when Jennie was an adult–that another memorial of the genocide was born, in the form of compilation of family trees of people who had lived in the village of Garmery. This book is just one of the testimonies to Armenian history that Jennie has helped create. In addition to the family trees, she also collected her mother’s papers into “A Brief Story Of The Garabedians,” which tells the story of her uncle’s attempt to find information about his wife and family, who were still in Armenia when the genocide began.
During the pandemic, Garabedian also authored a short book in which she recounted as much of the family’s story as she could remember. She did this so that the story could be passed on to her nieces and nephews; “we’ve all become very Americanized…so I just thought they would like to know this. And they were, they were very grateful to get it.”
Garabedian states that being a daughter of immigrants made her feel out of place among her American classmates, and it took her some time to embrace her Armenian heritage; however, as an adult, she has become active in the work of maintaining her family’s legacy. One such effort is a book she wrote about Armenians; as a child, she was distressed to see so many genocide survivors living in orphanages in New Britain, and so later she published an account of Armenian life in New England. In researching this book, she visited different families in New Britain and asked them for their stories, which they happily gave. Her book covers numerous aspects of the Armenian community in New Britain, from the formation of their first church in the area to their assimilation into American culture, but she chose to end the book by highlighting Armenian achievements: “The last chapter is the idea that there is hope. And there really is hope. Armenians are achievers…I talk about a judge of probate, doctors, lawyers, people who contribute to the communities they’re living in.