Gertrude Anthony Photographs (1919–1923)

A. Gertrude Anthony (1873–1967), niece of the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, served with Near East Relief from 1919 to 1923. After working in the Caucasus during the 1919 relief operations, she directed the boys’ orphanage at the NER station in Marsovan (Merzifon) from June 1921. The orphanage occupied the campus of Anatolia College, an American missionary school that had reopened in 1919; its forty-odd buildings, large hospital, and grounds sheltered as many as two thousand Armenian and Greek children orphaned by the genocides. In late July 1921, Topal Osman’s irregular forces killed an estimated 1,200 Greek and Armenian residents over four days and burned the Christian quarters; the survivors were deported in the weeks that followed. The orphanage carried on until the ultimatum of September 1922 forced its evacuation; Anthony led some five hundred children to Samsun in a fifty-six-wagon caravan and left Marsovan for good in January 1923.

Anthony photographed the children and the people who cared for them. Most of the images show the boys’ orphanage at Anatolia College — cohorts gathered before the arcaded halls and the North College dormitory, classes in tailoring and cobbling, and the children at music, drill, drama, athletics, and play. Others record the staff who ran the work, the Kuleli Orphan School at Constantinople (Istanbul) directed by Anthony’s sister Amy, and Anthony’s 1919 travels in the Caucasus, where relief workers in ACRNE uniforms gathered with children at Karaklis (Vanadzor) and Etchmiadzin. Few of the children’s names were ever recorded. For families today tracing an ancestor who survived an orphanage — or a relief worker who served in one — these faces are often the only trace that remains.

The Gertrude Anthony photographs are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (BANC PIC 1986.006). Dates, locations, and cataloging notes appear with each photograph.