Israelian Family
Sarah Anderson, a Lutheran pastor and great-granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, traces her lineage back to the village of Tadem, in Harput, Turkey. Her great-grandmother, Natalie Israelian, lived there until she was five, when her family was forced to flee for America. As a child, Anderson was told the story of her great-grandmother’s escape: “when she was five, they left in the dark of night from their family orchard. She talked about going and standing in the orchard; it was dark, and she couldn’t see. And her aunt was there with her.”
"my beloved aunt, my favorite aunt, I hugged her one last time and then we crept away in the dark... never to go back and never to see her again."
-Natalie Israelian
Natalie Israelian came to America in 1905. Sarkis Israelian, Sarah’s great-grandfather, came to America ten years earlier, in 1895. When he was a teenager, in 1915, his father went back to Armenia at the beginning of the genocide in the hopes of helping the rest of their family escape.
He never came back.