Nellie Miller Mann Photographs (1921–1923)

Nellie Miller Mann (1897–1997) grew up in the Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Indiana, and was a student at Goshen College when she learned of the Armenian and Greek Genocides. In 1921, she signed a two-year contract with Near East Relief as secretary to the treasurer at its Beirut headquarters. She was one of two Mennonite women who served in the Near East between 1919 and 1923.

Her desk was in the downtown office. Through her first winter, she watched “the procession that endlessly passed the broad glass doors.” One figure made her look up: a young Armenian woman, barefoot in the mud and rain, with a quilt of belongings on her back and a baby in her arm. By January 1923 Miller also ran the Individual Remittance Department, which paid out money sent from America to friends and relatives in Syria and Turkey. When thousands more Greeks and Armenians poured in from Cilicia and Anatolia that winter, people came in “from morning till night for their money.” In May 1923 she spent a holiday at the Birds’ Nest orphanage in Sidon, where Maria Jacobsen cared for some four hundred of the youngest children.

Some of these photographs are her own. The rest are prints by colleagues and other photographers. After a stop at the Beirut freight station in January 1922, where refugee families lived under the eaves, she wrote home, “I didn’t have my camera or I would have taken a dozen.” Her son, David W. Mann, published her letters as Letters from Syria, 1921–1923 (2013). The documents she kept form the companion collection, the Nellie Miller Mann Papers.

The collection is held at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Sources and provenance: Original photographs and captions from the Nellie Miller Mann Papers, Near East Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, courtesy of David W. Mann. For her service, see Nellie Miller Mann, Letters from Syria, 1921–1923: A Response to the Armenian Tragedy, Including Stories, Travel and Reports, transcribed and edited by David W. Mann (Morgantown, Pa.: Masthof Press, 2013), which is also the source of the quotations above. Her life dates follow her obituary in the Mennonite Weekly Review, February 27, 1997, 10. The Cleo A. and Nellie Miller Mann Papers (HM1-695) at the Mennonite Church USA Archives, Elkhart, Indiana, hold a related collection of her photographs and papers. Additional historical sources are cited in the individual photograph records.