Nellie Miller Mann

Nellie Miller was one of two women the Mennonite Relief Commission placed with Near East Relief, alongside at least twenty-nine Mennonite men, between 1919 and 1923. She had heard of the Armenian and Greek Genocides at Goshen College. She sailed from New York on August 20, 1921 with five of the men. One of them, Menno Shellenberger, died that winter.

At Near East Relief's Beirut headquarters, she kept the financial books as secretary to the treasurer and, by 1923, ran the individual remittance department, which paid out money sent from America to relatives in Syria and Turkey. With the general movement of Armenians, the department was flooded, and people came in from morning till night for their money. She wrote to the treasurer of the Mennonite Board of Missions in March 1923 that the area had overdrawn its appropriations by about $125,000 and that New York had cabled them "not to draw any more drafts without their authorization."

She visited the orphanages at Jebail (Byblos), Antilyas and the Birds' Nest at Sidon (Saida), and photographed them and the refugee camps at Beirut. She left Beirut at the end of August 1923. That December, from Elkhart, she published "The Children's Sacrifice," an account of the boys at Jebail who asked to give up part of their own food to feed the refugees in their village.