Armenian refugees leaving TurkeyA file of Armenian refugees with bundles crosses a bare ridge, fleeing Anatolia southward toward Aleppo and Beirut, 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).

NMM’s collection includes several photographs from outside her immediate Beirut beat: malnourished children at Diarbekir (Diyarbakır) in eastern Anatolia; Aintab orphans being evacuated to Ghazir; the beehive-house villages of northern Syria; archaeological excursions to nearby coastal sites; commercial postcards and printed reproductions she retained. Some are by other photographers and circulated within NER's reporting and fundraising networks; their presence in the album marks the wider geographic and institutional context within which her Beirut posting sat.