The Gannaways stand with the orphanage teachers. Jibail, 1922.
Location
Jebail (Byblos), Lebanon
Year
1922
Item Detail
Dr. Charles R. Gannaway served as a Near East Relief physician at Marash, where he treated a gravely ill child named Azadouhi, born at Zeitun in 1919. He and his wife Pearl brought her south with the 1922 convoys and later adopted her. The Gannaways were at Jibail with Azadouhi in the summer of 1922. Near East Relief bought an old silk factory on the shore at Jibail, below the Crusaders' Castle, and housed nearly 600 Armenian boys from Aintab there. Here, they stand with the orphanage's teaching staff.
Context
Bayard Dodge (1888–1972) taught at the Syrian Protestant College, later the American University of Beirut, and was its president from 1923 to 1948. The son of Near East Relief's treasurer, he helped build the network of orphanages that received Armenian children moved south out of Anatolia, and in April 1921 he secured French assurances that 1,000 children from Marash and 700 from Urfa could enter Syria.
The album records that movement and its aftermath through 1921 and 1922: the refugee camp at Alexandretta, the convoys out of Marash, the sailing of 1,500 Harpout orphans to Constantinople in September 1922, and the orphanages at Aleppo, Antilyas, Jebail, Nahr Ibrahim, Sidon, Miamia, Ghazir and Shemlan. A December 1922 count puts some 10,740 children in the Beirut-area institutions. Most were survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
Bayard Dodge Photograph Albums, Volume IV, American University of Beirut, Archives and Special Collections; digital surrogate by the Near East Foundation.
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Handwritten on the print: “Dr. + Mrs. Gannaway + teachers.”
Nellie Miller Mann, Letters from Syria, 1921-1923, p. 128, letter of 9 July 1922: “One day the Gannaways went to Jebail to visit the orphanage, and the poor dear little child was so frightened for fear they were going to leave her there that she clung about Mrs Gannaway's neck and would not raise her eyes.”
