Five orphan children by a whitewashed wall at Syra orphanage

Item Detail

Five children, boys and girls of different ages, sit together by a whitewashed wall at the orphanage. Nothing on the print names them. The Midgley papers name twelve children in all, and most of the children who passed through Syra are recorded only in photographs like this one. Near East Relief discharged them at sixteen to support themselves. The scrapbook names only two of the children the Midgleys photographed by their own choice, Costa and Johnny, both older boys given charge of work.

Context

Fred Midgley (1865–1939) was born in England and brought to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1869 at the age of four. He and Carrie A. Midgley, formerly Carrie A. Bancroft, ran a market garden and were long active in the Grange. Near East Relief wanted an American market gardener to take charge of the farm work at its orphanage on the island of Syra, and Fred Midgley signed a two-year agreement in August 1926. The couple sailed that September and served until 1928, he directing the agricultural work and she assisting him. The children there were survivors of the Armenian and Greek genocides and of the destruction of Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922. Near East Relief's own history calls Syra the last of its orphanage centers.

This photograph is one of a group of loose prints the family kept alongside their two scrapbook albums. They show the orphanage buildings and farm, the children and the American staff, and several carry inscriptions on the back naming individual children. Nancy Winter Taylor, their granddaughter, gave the papers to the Near East Foundation. They are held in the Near East Foundation records at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Accession 2012:071, RG 6, FA 1309.