Antranig Karjian says grace over a bowl and tin cup at the Birds' Nest Orphanage, Sidon, c. 1921–1923.

Context

Nellie Miller was born in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1897. While studying at Goshen College, she heard of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Near East and joined the Mennonite Relief Commission; in 1921, she accepted a two-year posting as secretary to the treasurer of Near East Relief's Beirut headquarters. Her letters home to her fiancé, Cleo Mann, and her family, written across more than two years in the field, document the daily work of NER administration in Beirut and the increasingly desperate refugee situation that followed the French withdrawal from Cilicia in 1921–1922.

Miller visited refugee camps and orphanages throughout her posting and curated a collection of photographs — some taken by herself, others by colleagues or acquired in the course of her work. She was a frequent and beloved visitor at the Birds’ Nest Orphanage at Sidon, where Danish relief worker Maria Jacobsen lived with some four hundred young Armenian children in a Druze palace on the hill above Sidon; the orphanage later relocated to Byblos (Jbeil), where it continues today. Her photographs capture the texture of childhood in that busy household and the broader fabric of NER's relief operations in post-Genocide Lebanon and Syria.

Nellie Miller and Cleo Mann were married in August 1924, after her return from the field. Nellie Miller Mann died in Indiana in 1997 at the age of 99. Her son, David Mann, published her writings and photographs in Letters from Syria, 1921–1923: A Response to the Armenian Tragedy, Including Stories, Travel and Reports (2013).

Several photographs included named individuals other than NMM. Recurring relief workers include Maria Jacobsen (Danish missionary, founder and director of the Birds’ Nest); Mrs. Knudsen, who co-directed the Antilyas Australasian Orphanage with her husband J.H. Knudsen; and Hilda J. King, the Australian secretary to NER's Managing Director in Beirut, NER's liaison officer for Australia, and author of the December 1923 Beirut Annual Report. Named orphans in the collection include Antranig Karjian (Birds’ Nest), Azadouhi (cared for in Beirut by Dr. and Mrs. Gannaway), and a boy NMM identified simply as "Albert" (Birds’ Nest, May 1923). Where identifications rest on filename annotations rather than image-confirmed inscriptions, that uncertainty is preserved in the record.