Fred and Carrie Midgley Scrapbook (1926–1928)

Fred and Carrie Midgley served as Near East Relief workers at the Syra (Syros) island orphanage in Greece from approximately 1926 to 1928. Fred trained boys in farming, agriculture, and animal husbandry, while Carrie contributed to education and recreation programs. The Syra orphanage complex, one of NER’s largest facilities in Greece, housed more than a thousand children — primarily Armenian and Greek genocide survivors — in a self-sustaining community that combined schooling, vocational training, and organized recreation.

The scrapbook follows the Midgleys from Fred’s recruitment in Worcester and the voyage out on the S.S. Braga in September 1926, through their two years at Syra, to their return home in 1928 and the recognition that followed. Its pages combine photographs, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and ephemera: boys working in the vegetable gardens and with livestock, the summer camp at Vari, group portraits and named children, the March 1928 distribution of 2,000 American “St. Louis” dolls to Armenian orphans, NER service medals, and published features about the Midgleys’ work in American papers from their departure into the early 1930s. A companion volume gathers the family’s letters home, a near day-by-day account transcribed by their son.

The scrapbook gives an unusually intimate view of a single NER site over a sustained period, showing both the institutional structure of orphanage life and how the Midgleys’ story reached audiences back home. The Midgley papers are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center.