Blanche S. Easton was a graduate nurse of the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. She joined the American Committee for Relief in the Near East among its first volunteers and sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey on the S.S. Leviathan on February 16, 1919, with the party of about 250 doctors, nurses, and other workers later remembered as the “Leviathan party,” the first large group of American relief workers to enter the former Ottoman Empire after the Armistice. The organization assigned her first to Smyrna (Izmir) and later to Cesarea (Caesarea/Kayseri), where she nursed at the Talas Hospital. She cared for Armenian and Greek refugees and orphans in central Anatolia in the aftermath of the genocides. Easton served nearly two years and returned to the United States in May 1921. On July 12, 1921 she married a fellow relief worker, Joseph W. Beach, at Ridgewood, New Jersey, and the couple traveled home by way of England, Germany, Switzerland, and the Balkans. She is listed in the memorial under her married name, Blanche Easton Beach.
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