Orphan girls with Nellie Miller Mann at the Seaside 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).

The Birds’ Nest and the Antilyas Orphanage were two distinct NER facilities that Nellie Miller Mann photographed during her posting. The Birds’ Nest, founded and directed by Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen, cared for the youngest survivors of the Armenian Genocide. During Miller's posting, it occupied a Druze palace on the hill above Sidon, with some 400 children in residence — most under nine years old. Around 1928, KMA acquired the Byblos (Jbeil) site from NER, and Jacobsen continued to direct the Birds’ Nest there until 1960; it operates today at Byblos as the Birds’ Nest / Aram Bezikian Museum under the Catholicosate of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Cilicia. The Antilyas Orphanage, five miles north of Beirut, was a separate and much larger NER facility — the Australasian Orphanage, supported chiefly by Australian donations and directed by Mr. and Mrs. J.H. Knudsen of New Zealand, housing some 1,300 boys in the buildings of a former paper mill. NEF converted the Antilyas premises into the Armenian Theological Seminary in 1930 in partnership with Catholicos Sahak II Khabayan, later selling the property to the Armenian Church; the site continues today as a cathedral and seminary — one of the two principal centers of the worldwide Armenian Apostolic Church.