Lisa Misakian

Description

Transcription

00:08 - 00:25
Gregory Jundanian (GJ): …for our project with the Armenians of Whitinsville, and I thought we’d start with … mention your full name, the date, where we are, and then we can talk about your family’s history and see how everything unfolds.
00:26
Lisa Misakian (LM): Sure. My name is Lisa Misakian. We're here in Whitinsville on August 19th. And this would have been my mother's 94th birthday.
00:37
GJ: Wow.
00:40
LM: And we're here in the same town that she grew up in.
00:41
GJ: And the year is 2023.
00:43
LM: Correct.
00:44
GJ: Why don't we start with… Well, why don’t we start with your mother's side of the family?
00:50
LM: Okay.
00:50
GJ: What was her maiden name and what village did her ancestors come from?
00:55 - 01:37
LM: So, my mother's maiden name was Helen Altoonian. She was born in Whitinsville, the third child born to Giuregh and Vartanoush Altoonian. They are, both of them, were from Sepastia in Armenia, and they were married in Sivas, in the capital of Sepastia,  and were separated for seven years before they were reunited here in Whitinsville. My grandfather, Giuregh, was from a village called Yarasar in Sepastia, and my grandmother was from Sivas proper, the city.
01:39
GJ: And what did they do in the old country, or do you know much about the family history?
01:43 - 02:36
LM: I've learned a little bit about the family history. I knew my grandmother Vartanoush the longest in my life. She.. She didn't go to school. She wasn't educated to read or write, but she was trained to be an oriental rug weaver. And after she came to this country, she was taking commissions to weave rugs, some fairly large sized ones. And we still have some of the smaller rugs that she would make out of the scraps from the commission projects. So that was a skill that she kept even in this country when she came. And actually, in 1936, she was invited to show the craft of Oriental rug weaving in the Rhode Island Tercentennial because she had some relatives.
02:37 - 03:29
LM: Her brother had also survived. One of her brothers had survived and was living in Rhode Island and had arranged for her to be on the Armenian float in the parade that celebrated Rhode Island's Tercentennial. And it was written up in the papers, and I found the clipping as I was going through her stuff. So that was kind of interesting and I knew that she had woven rugs, but I had never seen the loom -- I had never seen her doing that. By the time I came along, she was older and no longer capable to do the physical work of weaving rugs. I'm sure my grandfather was probably a farmer. I mean, Yarasar was a very small village and like most, it was an agrarian economy back then. But he was working in the Whitin Machine Works here when he was able to finally successfully reunite with his wife, with my grandmother.
03.31
GJ: And do you know anything about their respective parents?
03:34 - 04:39
LM: I'm learning. My grandfather's parent's names were Tateos and Dusquhi.. And Dusquhi was given to my mother as her Armenian name, Helen being the American name. And Tateos was given to my Uncle Tom as his name. So.. And Thomas was his English name. And I have an Aunt Mary who was the oldest child born here.  When they were separated, when-when he left the village. Because when they married, she moved to the village. When he left the village to come to America in 1913, they didn't know she was pregnant. So along came Barkev, their firstborn, a son, and he never met that son. That son was killed on the marches. So they had a long separation, and it was thanks to non-Armenian people here in Whitinsville that they were able to get reunited.
04:40
GJ: Hmm.
04:41
LM: Should I tell that story? 
04:43
GJ: Of course
04:44 - 05:45
LM: Okay. So, you know, I already said he (Giuregh) was working in the shop and he had a really like, the dirtiest of jobs and probably like, fueling the furnaces because my my father remembers him working in the shop as being always covered head to toe in soot. And he was a fairly short man. I never met him. He died six years before I was born. But besides working in the shop, he was here alone. He didn't know what was happening to his family back home. So he took odd jobs, including gardening. And he had done a flower garden for one of the wealthy families in town. And the woman in that family had a sister in town. And that sister said, Oh, you know, your roses have never looked so good. And she says, Oh, you have to use my gardener, Jimmy, because his English name became Jimmy, even though Giuregh means Cyrus.
05:46 - 06:32
LM: So anyways, so my grandfather went to work for the sister of the first customer, and she kind of noticed he was very sad. And in his broken English, I guess he described to her that here he was taking care of her roses, but he didn't know where his Rose was. And so, she, this woman was married to a lawyer in town.  I guess they took pity on my grandfather and helped him produce an affidavit. And, he, this lawyer then circulated that to all the refugee centers where the Armenians had gathered after the genocidal marches. And through that work, they located my grandmother and were able to reunite. And then…
06:32
GJ: Wow – what was the lawyer’s name.
06:33 - 06:45
LM: The lawyer's name was Harry Brown. And in fact, the first person who helped us with the first historical piece for our project is the granddaughter of Harry Brown.
06:47
GJ: Really?
06:48
LM: Brouwer, Carol Brouwer.
06:50
GJ: What a small world
06:52
LM: Yes, very small world.
06:54
GJ: So do you know any of the history of what your grandmother went through?
06:57 - 08:15
LM: She never talked to me about it. She wouldn't talk to my mother about it. The only person in the family that occasionally, only if she was really pressed to talk about it, was my uncle, my Uncle Tom. So everything I have is, you know, secondhand from him, either directly or through my mother to me. But she saw, you know, horrendous things happened to her family members. She… They were gathering the women to leave the village. By this point, the men had been all killed and they were gathering the women. And this, I guess Turkish, captain or whatever had said, I want her. I hear there's a master weaver in this village and I want her to come with me to teach my women how to do her work. And so someone pointed out that it was my grandmother, and she said, Well, my sister has to come with me. But her sisters had already been killed. So she rescued another woman from the village and they went first there. And then at some point she ended up in indentured servitude to an Arabic family and then ended up in a refugee center in Beirut.
08:14
GJ: And her son?
08:16
LM: Son was killed on the marches.
08:18
GJ: But did she go through the marches herself or are they separated?
08:22
LM: No. She went through the marches herself. She was trying to hide him. At one point, they were taking the male children. He was probably like two years old at that time. And she was hiding him under her skirts. And as best my uncle could figure out, is that he probably suffocated. 
08:39
GJ: So after that, she became the indentured servant of the weaver, of the Turkish….
08:48 - 09:06
LM: Right. And then at some point, she ended up with some level of eye disease or hysterical blindness or something to do with her eyes. And that then ended up leading her to the refugee center where the letter was matched up, that it was her, you know. So…
09:09
GJ: And how about your dad's side of the family?
09:09 - 10:42
LM: My dad's side of the family is a second marriage for both my grandparents. His father had come originally to Whitinsville in the late 1880s as a very young, unmarried man from the village of Parchanj in Kharpert province. And he and his brother Haroutiun -- his name was Yeghiazar.  He and his brother Haroutiun would take turns. One would be here earning money to send back for the family, etc. On one of his trips back, he married and he started a family and he happened to be in Whitinsville when the genocide reached his village. So he tried his best to try to find out what had happened to his family, talking to other people who had come after him. He put an ad in the Armenian newspaper: “Does anyone know? I've heard that she might be with this group of refugees, etc.”. But eventually he learned that he had lost his wife and he wasn't sure what had happened to his children. So he was still working in the shop here in Whitinsville , and eventually someone connected him with his second wife, my grandmother.
10:42 - 12:11
LM: She had lost her first husband in the genocide.  She was from… originally, she was born in the village of Khultik in the province of Bitlis and her father was a Protestant minister in that village, and he had been assassinated by the Turks because he was proselytizing to the Muslims to try to convert them to Christianity. Her mother had died shortly after giving birth to her, so she had been really raised by nannies that her father had hired and she married a man who was from the capital, from the capital of Bitlis. He was a merchant, and he was killed in the..when they removed all the men from the city and she was left with three children and she ended up on the marches. And I only learned this part most recently listening to a taped interview of my oldest aunt, her oldest child, who was on the marches with her. And she said that they had reached the river and they had seen groups before them pushed into the river or bayoneted and pushed into the river, and they had reached the edge of the river.
12:13 - 13:36
LM: So she, with her children -- she took her cloak and she covered her children because she didn't want them to see what was going to happen to them.  And a servant of theirs, a Turkish servant of theirs, stepped forward and said, This is my family, don't do that to them. So he saved their lives. And then she was afraid for her children because it had come so close to them being killed. So she started giving them away. And the first one was this aunt who told this story. They had buried some of their gold in the house, and this oldest child knew where the gold was. And she wanted to give that gold to the Turkish man that saved them. So she sent her with him back to their house, the family compound. And, but the promise was that the man would not return the child to her, that he would bring her to this American missionary school that was in Bitlis where a cousin was teaching and that the cousin would take care of this daughter. So he did. He kept his word. She, she showed him where the gold was. He took it and he brought her to that school. And that's why that story survived, because otherwise we would never have known that story. My grandmother, Apisag, never spoke those stories. Not to anyone.
13:40 - 13:55
GJ: I want to go to what happened with the other two children.But before I do, can you give me a little history about your mother's family in Bitlis? They must have been wealthier because you said they were a merchant and.
13:55 - 14:56
LM:Yeah, so she… she clearly, my grandmother, you know, being, she was educated over there, which was unusual for women because her father was a Protestant minister. Her brother had become a Protestant minister. She had a brother. That was it, just the two of them, because her mother had died shortly after childbirth. And he never remarried. So he had hired, I guess, a nanny to help raise her and somehow arranged her, her marriage to her first husband. His name was Hapet Ablahadian, and he was Apostolic. They were Armenian Protestant. He was Apostolic, but he was from a wealthy merchant family. And they had what my aunt described as like a compound in the city of Bitlis, where multiple branches of the family lived, including sort of the surviving matriarch from the generation before
14:56
GJ: And Bitlis is the Armenian word for Istanbul.
15:01 - 15:34
LM: No. Bitlis is an eastern province. It's between Kharpert and Dikranagert, between modern day Elazig and Diyarbekir. So it's in the mountains. The village she had originally come from was a high mountainous village. The city is quite big. I've been to that city. I did not know she was living in, she had lived in that city. I thought when she got married she had stayed in her village. But that wasn't the case.
15:35
GJ: Do you know what he did as a merchant?
15:37 - 16:17
LM: You know, again, my aunt was seven years old, so she has really bad recollections. But she remembered that in addition to whatever he was buying and selling, because he would disappear on these trade missions, that he also would loan money to like the people who were in the villages that needed money to get started on their crops and things.And he loaned money to Turks as well as to Armenians. And, you know, he was well respected, but he was caught up like all the other men because he happened to be home when they rounded up the men and they learned that he was gone.
16:18
GJ: And your dad's grandfather's family in Parchanj?
16:24 - 18:06
LM: In Parchanj, my father came from a long line of families from that village.  We can go back at least five generations, thanks to a book that was written by one of your ancestors. I didn't know that book existed until even after my father had passed. And I know my father did not know about the book. So it's kind of sad. But looking at it and I've learned so much more about the male side of that family history, including there's a section in the book that describes how my great grandfather died. I think it's really strange that or probably not strange, but both great grandfathers, my father's mother's father and my father's father's father died because they were Christians. My grandmother's father was assassinated because he was trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and my father's father's father died in a massacre in the 1890s in the village when it was part of the broader Hamidian massacres.  But there's an eyewitness account written in the book that says he was one of the men that was exiting church during Holy Week and he was mowed down by bullets. All the men who were in church that night were killed and buried in a mass grave. And there's a whole story about it in the book.
18:11 - 18:23
GJ: What a history. So your your dad landed here. How did he meet -not your dad…your grandfather landed here. How did he meet his wife? She's from Bitlis?
18:23 - 19:47
LM: Yeah, that she had a cousin who lived on D Street. He was living on Spring Street in the Mantashigian house. And these cousins, the Sahagian cousins, were living on D Street and by this point, my father's mother, my grandmother Apisag, had reached Istanbul, where her brother was serving as an Armenian Protestant minister. He had taken her in and he knew that she was widowed and somehow he reached out to these cousins to say, Can you help me get her out of here? You know, it's not safe for her to be here. And so I think those cousins arranged the marriage. They probably looked around and saw who had recently found out they were a widower and somehow that marriage was arranged and they actually got married in their house on D Street.  A Protestant, Armenian Protestant minister came from Worcester and married them in the house. Little did we know… Well, years later, a few doors down, my mother would be born on D Street. So I think it's kind of strange that my paternal grandparents were born on, were married on that street, and my mother was born on that street.
19:49
GJ: I mean, that street was almost all Armenian
19:51
LM: There was one Polish family.
19:53
GJ: Yeah. And that was in what's called the Village, which was a neighborhood that the Shop had built for its workers, I think in the 1920s.
20:04
LM: No, earlier than that, because this was the 1920s. They got married in that house in 1921.
20:10
GJ: So a little bit earlier.
20:12
LM: Yeah.
20:14
GJ: Fascinating. What are your earliest memories of your grandparents?
20:19 - 22:10
LM: So I never knew either grandfather.  Yeghiazar died in 1940 when my father was in high school, and Giuregh died in 1950. My mother had graduated from high school. She was working as a stenographer at the shop at the time, but I knew both grandmothers. Grandma Apisag, by the time I was born, she.. the family had moved to Border Street in the Village. They had lived downtown, but they had moved to Border Street. And my grandmother Vartanoush was still living on D Street, so Sundays after going to Armenian church were always family days, so we would alternate Sundays one Sunday we would be with Grandma Apisag. When, the next Sunday we would be with Grandma Vartanoush.  And we didn't call them those names when we were kids. We called Grandma Apisag “Kheyma Grandma”, because she always, always had kheyma ready for us, which was not a dish that was so much a Bitlisi dish. But she had learned how to make it for her Kharpertsi husband, so she would always have kheyma ready for us when we would come home from church and she would have already made the stuffing --the por -- for the porov kufteh. So we would stay there and play all afternoon. And then we'd have dinner, so we'd have kheyma for lunch and then she would make the porov kufteh for dinner. Grandma Vartanoush always made chicken and pilaf, so she was “Chicken and Pilaf Grandma”. I don't think we knew which grandma belonged to which family. It's just like, well, we have a “Kheyma Grandma”, and we have a “Chicken and Pilaf Grandma”.
22:10
GJ: For the tape, what is kheyma?
22:13 - 23:13
LM: Kheyma is a quintessential Kharpertsi dish that is the equivalent of Armenian steak tartare. It's minced ground meat. I think in the old country it definitely would have been lamb, but in this country, most often it was beef that's very, very clean, no fat. It's ground three times and it's mixed with bulgur wheat, which is dried, steamed, cracked wheat that's been milled very fine.  And it's kneaded together to create this dish. And then it's served with chopped parsley and chopped onions and chopped peppers. And when we would visit Grandma Apisag and she would have this dish, we would always have patz hatz with it. Now, that's another quintessential Armenian bread. That's a cracker bread. So it's baked and then dried and then rehydrated. So we would have kheyma sandwiches on the patz hatz..
23:14 - 24:12
LM: And my uncle, my father's oldest half brother from his father's first marriage, had survived. We had -- I'll tell the story later about how he was found. But he, he had made it to this country by this point. And he would be there on Sundays, along with my father's younger brother, Pete. Peter and Uncle Misak would always have nickel bottles of Coca-Cola for us kids, and we would love to drink our Coca-Cola. And we were always amazed because he would make his kheyma sandwich with patz hatz on one side and Wonder Bread on the other side. And we were like, later, as an adult, I realized that that's the two sides of his life. You know, he had that still was old country because he was born there, but he was very Americanized. And so he had the white bread on the other side.
24:12
GJ: And I think from a practical point of view, the sandwich doesn't fall apart.
24:16
LM: Right.
24:18
GJ: It's funny. So a lot of relatives came for these Sunday dinners like,
24:22
LM: No, it was, it was…
24:24
GJ: Just your family?
24:24 - 25:18
LM: Yeah. Because most of the… especially on my dad's side, the family never lived together as a whole. My grandmother had these three children that had survived, that she had given away to… the first to the Turk who had helped the family survive. And he had handed her off to this Armenian teacher who was working in an American missionary school.  And she hid that aunt in the closet that every time the Turks would come looking for Armenian children.  The other two children she gave to American missionaries, and eventually she was able to locate all her those three children and help them come here. And in fact, she arranged marriages for her two daughters, and her son was the last one to come.
25:19 - 26:18
LM: Her middle daughter and her son came through Cuba, came through Havana, because by the time they were located, immigration restrictions had set into place. And so the closest place that wasn't cold that they could stay was Cuba. My aunt was staying with…. my oldest aunt, my father's oldest half sister was staying with my grandmother's brother, the Protestant minister, in Istanbul.  He had arranged a nanny for her and private schooling, so she got some education over there before she came here and was married. By the time she came here, my father was two years old, so she was married off pretty quickly. And so my father knew-got to know his oldest half siblings by visiting them wherever they lived, not by them living in the family house.
26:22 - 27:40
LM: So the two sisters ended up married to men that had little corner grocery stores in Manchester, New Hampshire. So there was a lot of back and forth between Manchester and Whitinsville, with those families and Uncle Archie was almost the same age as his nieces and nephews.  In fact, that Auntie Armen, the oldest half sister, was pregnant with her first child when my grandmother was pregnant with her last one, and she, my aunt gave birth first.  So when Uncle Peter came along, he was already an instant uncle, which was kind of cool. On my mother's side by the time, because my mother was the youngest,  her siblings had already been married and were out of the house. So my grandmother was living alone at that point. And so when we would go for Sunday, it was usually just our family. Occasionally some of the cousins would come.  My aunt had moved to Connecticut and my uncle was living in Uxbridge and then eventually came around the corner on Willow Street. But usually we didn't. We were only together for the bigger holidays, not for regular Sundays.
27:41 - 27:53
GJ: And, you know, speaking of grandparents, if you could say something to one of them now or ask them a question, is there one in particular you'd want to ask? And what would that question be?
27:55 - 29:18
LM: I would love to talk to both grandmothers about what, how life was different for them in the old country and how life was different here. And especially since they went, I, if they were comfortable talking about what they went through, that would be fine. But that's not what would be top of mind. It would be mostly, you know, Tell me about the family I never got a chance to meet, you know, and all I have are these little scribbled notes that I'm trying to piece together through DNA. I've already found on my father's side. But this isn't so much the grandmother. I would love to ask my grandfather more questions because he had a brother who survived and brought his whole family over and they lived in California and there was no connection between the two. And I, you know, I found them through Ancestry. So it's and the book validates all the information. And as does the DNA. So it's, it's perplexing to me that they went through so much to live in the same country, albeit thousands of miles apart. Why was there no connection between the two? Did they not know that one survived, that both survived?29:20
GJ: It's possible.
29:21
LM: Yeah.
29:21
GJ: So you've done a lot of work around DNA. Why do you do this?
31:15
LM: Well, I didn't really start out wanting to do that.  Years and years ago, when I was still a student here in Northbridge, one of our teachers had given us an assignment to learn how to write a biography, to interview a living relative about a deceased relative, preferably someone we never met. And so I brought that assignment home and I asked my parents, like, Who do I talk to about whom? And my father suggested I talk to Uncle Misak about my grandfather. And through that school assignment, I wrote a biography of my grandfather, and I would then be the one cousin when the cousins would get together. “Tell us again how we're all related?” We all have different last names, you know, because it was a blended family that had never lived together. And I would tell them the story about Apisag and Yeghiazar and how they got married here and all this. So I thought that was the end of it. And I had promised those cousins I would put like a little booklet together. And so that, you know, when I'm gone, everyone would remember the story. But my nephew had done Ancestry without consulting any of us, and he had gotten some very interesting results. And he asked if his mother, my sister, and I and my father, who was still alive, would consider doing it. And I said, Sure, But, you know, we know who survived. We don't have a lot of family here. And he said, I don't know. I'm seeing a lot of stuff here. So we said, okay. And thankfully, the first sets of results were coming through before my father passed.
31:16 - 32:37
LM: And I asked him some of the questions. I said, Do any of these Armenian names sound familiar? And some of the last names, he said, Oh, you know, that's a Parchantsi name or that, you know, maybe Cambridge. But he didn't really know the first names. So these were probably children or grandchildren of the people he knew from his early childhood years. So about three months after my father passed away, I just had this inkling to check his account on Ancestry and I found I had come home from church and I was like saying, maybe I should just check it. So I did. And there was an email waiting for me from my grandfather's brother's great grandson, writing to my father -- I think we might be related. So I had to write to this man I didn't know and say, You know, my father's since passed, but you're on my Ancestry list as well. And he wrote back, and says, Are you Armenian? And I wrote back, ‘Duh, yes.” And I told the four sides and he asked a few more questions. And I said something about my grandfather was from Parchanj, and he sent a California number and he said, call me immediately.
32.39 - 33:49
LM: And I did. And he said, I'm staring at a picture of your grandfather right now. I said, I don't even know what my grandfather looked like. He says, You don't have any pictures. I said, No, he died in 1940. He said, Well, he's in the book. And I said, What book? And that's when I found out there's a book called Village of Parchanj that had the family tree in it that had a story of how the family originally came from Palu 500 years ago to this little village.  And what everyone's professions were. And it all lined up with the information I had gotten from the interview with my uncle about my grandfather. And so, in fact, there was a picture right by my grandfather's picture of his first family. And there was my Uncle Misak's picture was in there as a child, as a like a two year old child with this big Turkish sword in his hand. And I have that picture. He had that picture. So I was like, okay, I'm hooked.  Now, I've got to figure it out.
33:50 - 34:06
GJ: And there's always a search for community because our communities were torn up over that. I think it's inherent in being Armenian. What are some of the things you think are inherent of being Armenian, especially of that heritage growing up in a small diasporan town?
34:05 - 36:08
LM: Yeah, I think especially in a place like Whitinsville and where I and my family lived, where I was a child, we lived around the corner from the church. So the church was the center of our life. But it wasn't just the center of our religious life, it was the center of our cultural life. And so I was very, you know, it was very important for my parents for us to not just learn how to speak, which we learned how to do in the home out of respect to both grandmothers, we spoke Armenian with them. As best I know, my first language was Armenian and my parents were afraid that I would end up like they were, they did -- that they would-I would go to school and not know how to speak English. So they made a conscious decision to switch to English as the house language. But when we would visit those grandmothers on Sundays, we spoke Armenian. But she wanted-my mother wanted me to know how to read or write, which both parents struggled a little bit, where they had gone to Armenian school in Whitinsville. And so there were teachers that would come from the bigger cities and teach Armenian. But they weren't so good at reading and writing, but they wanted us to learn how to do it. So Armenian school twice a week after school, Sunday school on Sundays. And then there were the Armenian political organizations that we belonged to. But my mother also emphasized American life. So I was a Girl Scout. You know, we had after school activities, sports, all these things. So I had both lives knitted together in a small town where luckily most of the non-Armenians knew Armenians and knew who we were.  We didn't have to really explain our culture as much as people I've since met who lived in broader American communities where they'd have to go through and explain. So
36:08
GJ: What do you think the population was when you were a kid of town, 10,000 maybe?
36:13
LM: I, I yeah, I would say probably around that. But I really, I really don't know
36:18
GJ: What do you think that the Armenian percentage was, roughly?
36:23 - 36:53
LM: I would say it's very influenced by where you lived in town. But like where I lived, I had a lot of Armenian neighbors, so it felt like it was a lot more than it probably was. My mother tried to keep Armenian businesses going, like so we were customers of Armenian businesses. Even if we went to a non-Armenian store, you would ask for the Armenian butcher. You know, it was like things like that you learned growing up.
36:55
GJ: So what are some of the lessons that you learned from your parents about, you know, cultural lessons or just life lessons that you think are important?
37:02 - 38:46
LM: I think, you know, there's there's sort of I'm guessing I learned it from my parents because I can't imagine any other way. But sort of this whole notion of it takes a village and pay it forward.  So I feel like for all of what the people here did for me as a child growing up, teaching me the language, teaching me to appreciate my culture, even things that were not Armenian like my American life, Girl Scouts. I did all of that as an adult to give back to the next generation, whether they were Armenian or not. So I was an Armenian school teacher at my church in Connecticut for 30, over 30 years. I was… in that school, I was the only American-born Armenian school teacher. All the other ones were from either Beirut or later from Hayastan. And I thought it was important for many of the kids who never heard Armenian spoken in the house to have someone that they felt safe with, where they could learn the words and the letters and all of that from me. So that was a very important thing for me to do to complete that part of my life. And even with scouting, which was totally a non-Armenian thing, I was I ran a Girl Scout troop in an inner city housing complex in a neighboring city while I was in college. And that was, you know, really important for me to give back as well. My sister's the same way -- she was in scouting for ages.
38:48
GJ: And I loved Boy Scouts, so.. I had a question… Oh, you mentioned earlier political organization -- do you want to talk about that for a little bit.
39:10 - 40:21
LM: Yeah. So my parents both were members of the Armenian political party called the Dashnaks. And my mother had been very involved jn the beginnings of that youth group that was part of that umbrella organization the AYF from when from-before she was even married to my father. So it was very important for both of them that all of us would be involved with the AYF chapters here. And she was an advisor to the AYF chapter here even before I think I was old enough to join. So that was a big part of our lives. And at that point when I was a child, we still had the, the club, the political organization’s club building. So those meetings would be at the club. Armenian school would be at the church, Sunday school would be at the church. So all of them were walking distance from the house. My mother didn't drive. So for us to be able to walk to all these things, the library, all of that was important.
40:21 - 40:35
GJ: So you spent a lot of time in Armenian related Sunday school, church, AYF building, club building. That's interesting. What, what would you do at the AYF meetings?
40:36 - 41:56
LM: Well, there were there were these things called educationals, where they had these blue colored books that would tell various chapters and stories of Armenian history, both old history, as well as the more modern history that led to the events of the genocide. So, you know, every meeting there would be-someone's job would have been to read the chapter and then explain to the members so that they kept the history alive. We would learn the songs, especially the revolutionary songs, and there would be arts and crafts projects. I never became a senior, but I left town before I reached the age to be a member of the senior chapter. But there were like sports events that involved chapters from other locations, and that would always be a cool thing to do. I went to summer camp at Camp Haiastan. My mother had helped chop the trees to help build that camp alongside her brother, my Uncle Tom. So, you know, there were we knew we were special because we were from Whitinsville. And so but we also understood there was a broader Armenian community that we were part of. And because some of my cousins were far away, too, I knew there were Armenians outside of Whitinsville that we weren't just in Whitinsville.
41:58
GJ: Did the Camp Haiastan have picnics?
42:00
LM: Oh, yeah, well.
42:01
GJ: What were they like?
42:03 - 43:18
LM: Oh, we went to quite a few picnics for a couple of reasons. One, because I think my mother just liked to support the camp. But there was, besides the lower camp where the kids would go to summer camp, there was an upper camp or what they call the upper camp part of the property. And there were private cabins there. And my father, my mother's brother's in-laws, owned one of those cabins. So when-when there was a picnic, we would go to visit them. And although he wasn't my grandfather, he was my cousin's grandfather. He was really one of the only-other than my uncles. He was the only one that I knew that was of that generation that was still alive.  They were Dikranagertsi . So they spoke very heavily Turkified Armenian. It was really hard to understand him. But again, out of respect, you would speak Armenian to them. So we went quite often, especially when my mother knew that it was another city's picnic and she knew the people from there. So we’d get, you know, dragged along the way.
43:19
GJ: How many people would go to larger picnics? 1,000?
43:23
LM: Oh, easily, easily.
43:26
GJ: And what was what was happening at the picnic?
43:28 - 44:51
LM: Music.  There would be a dance floor. There was a wooden dance floor and there was lots of food. The old men would be playing backgammon. My father would play. The kids would go off and play. I mean, we weren't closely supervised.  It wasn't like today. It was like a village. You know, people would recreate that. And the oldest days there were also picnics that weren't American geography. There were picnics that were the old village, geography picnics. And I went to those. I have very vague memories as a very young child going to the Yarasartsi picnics for my grandfather and my mother's father's village. And they would sometimes have the kids dress up in the old costumes. My grandmother made some of those costumes. I have some of those. And so I think it was an opportunity for the people from those picnics. It was an opportunity for the people from the old villages to see one another because travel was was expensive, you know, even if it was just to a different part of Massachusetts, people would make the effort to I'll be in this one location.And the old people could, you know, have their visits, which was important for them. It's not like they had phones that they could pick up and talk to each other.
44:51 - 
GJ: What was it like in the club? You mentioned this earlier, when you walked in to the club what did it look like?
44:56 - 46:06
LM: Oh my God.So you walk into the club, The windows would be sort of like dusty and these old, you know, shades would be half drawn.You'd walk in it, be cigar smoke and this huge candy display case in the front that the men would be all on this first floor. They, they had tables. They'd be playing pinochle, they’d play backgammon, they played cards. They were all talking Armenian. This was when I was really young. And the kid and then a lot of the genocide survivors were still alive. And I would walk past all these men and I'd think like, you know, I never got to know my grandfathers, but they were that generation. And then our meeting space was downstairs. So then you'd go down these stairs and there was like a big hall with a stage and maybe folding chairs and tables. I don't remember so much that part. But yeah, it was, it was-you felt like you had to kind of run the gauntlet through where all these guys are playing the cards and the pinochle and all of that.
46:06
GJ:  And there were photographs or?
46:07 - 46:50
LM: Oh, the photographs, the photographs. They, they scared and fascinated me at the same time because they were all the Fedayis, which are the freedom fighters. Many of whom were dressed in their, you know, they didn't have uniforms, but they had a look like the double machine gun belt, you know, whatever it wasn't. They did have machine guns, but all the bullets, you know, across them, some on horses. And we had to learn all of their names. I don't remember them now, but like you look at a picture.Oh, that's, you know, Mourad from Sepastia. And our chapter was named after one of the heroes – Rosdom.  So his picture was more prominent.
46.50
GJ: And yeah, I remember that. I remember the candy being moldy.
46:52 - 47:03
LM: Yeah, you said that. But see. Yeah, but I never had a grandfather to buy me that candy, you know.
47:04
GJ: But I didn’t either
47:05
LM: For us, our candy was going to Pauly’s store on East Street, Lower East Street and buying penny candy.
47:12
GJ: What was that like?
47:15 - 48:15
LM: That was a routine. We had a whole routine as children growing up being Armenian children, especially in our neighborhoods. We would -- one of my chores was to stop and check on my grandmother every day. And I had a friend who had both grandparents were living on the same street as my grandmother. So we would stop by and visit her grandparents. We'd get fed an afternoon snack. They had a grape arbor in the backyard. It was wonderful and then we'd walk to my grandmother's house and then we'd get fed. So by the time we got home, my mother didn't have to have any afternoon snacks for us. But sometimes we weren't going home from there. Sometimes we were going to Armenian school, and if we were doing that, we would stop by Pauly's store, which was sort of between or like a triangle to these two sets of grandparents. And we would buy penny candy. We always had pennies with us and we had our favorites.
48:18
GJ: What were they, do you remember?
48:18 - 48:44
LM: Oh yeah, I loved Jaw Breakers and there were these like little wax bottles that had, like, yeah, like sweet, syrupy liquid inside of it. And then the long paper strips with the little dots on it. And until I was, I learned about the Turkish genocide. I loved Turkish taffy and then I wouldn't buy it because it was called Turkish taffy.
48:44
GJ: When did you learn about the genocide? How old were you?
48:48
LM: I don't remember the exact age, but I know I didn't learn at home. I know I learned through the AYF. It was probably in an educational.
48:56
GJ: So probably 11, 12 years old?
48:58 - 50:32
LM: Yeah. Yeah. And then it took me a long time to realize that it wasn't just a story in a book that affected some people. It affected my own family. And in fact, when I would stop and visit my grandmother, my mother's mother, every day after school, she had this large portrait in her living room that, you know, I remember seeing all the time. That was how I knew what my grandfather looked like, because it was my grandmother, my grandfather and the son that didn't survive. So years later, as an adult, when I learned that Barkev didn't survive and that my grandfather never met him because he never made it out of the old country, I turned to my mother and I said, Well, there's a picture of the three of them on Grandma's wall, you know, how did that happen?  And she explained that, you know, that happened to a lot of families. And the families would arrange with a photographer to in the studio create a blended photo. And she said that photo of your grandfather is a separate photo and the photo of your grandmother and Baby Barkev was a separate photo taken in the old country. I've since learned that one of my grandmother's sisters married into a very famous Armenian photographer family in Sivas. And so they were probably the ones that took that portrait of her and her son.
50:32
GJ: You know the name of the family?
50:33 - 50:58
LM: Yes, Encababian.  Their collections are like on Houshamadyan and at the museum. And, you know, several of the cousins, I guess, from that family came to New York and they're showing up in my Ancestry. And I'm slowly reaching out to them to meet them. But I know my parents knew-knew that my mother knew them because they got invited to their wedding.
51:01
GJ: Do you remember any Armenian weddings that you went to as a kid?
51:04 - 51:21
LM: All my cousins, because they were all, you know, my, myself, my sister, my brother are the youngest cousins out of my father's family. So all my cousins are like ten, 15, 20 years older than me. So yeah.
51:21
GJ: What were those weddings like?
51:24 - 52:19
LM: Fun, you know, they in some, especially when an Armenian married an Armenian, which wasn't all of them, there were a lot of the traditions either blended from the two areas that those families came from. So one of my mother's one of my first cousins from my mother's side at that wedding, and it was their 50th wedding anniversary yesterday. My sister and I were remembering.  When-when they got married, because we were from the groom's side, we went to the family, the bride's family's house, and stole a bunch of things from the house and danced back in with them at their wedding. And that was fun because it recreated in a way, the tradition that had carried through for my parents own wedding and that photograph is on the website.
52:19 - 52:30
GJ: I never heard of that tradition until I saw that photograph. That might’ve been from a, my ancestor is from the same area but I never heard of it
52:30 - 53:10
LM: Yeah, well, for sure it's a Sepastatsi tradition for sure, but I don't know how broad it was. But yeah, I mean I was a young child at most of my first cousins on my father's side, you know, their weddings.So and many of those were an Armenian marrying a non Armenian. So they weren't necessarily Armenian style weddings, but some were, some were Armenian. Armenian. But I don't really have specific memories of those. 53:02 - 53:26
GJ: You know, too -- you mentioned food earlier, and I think there's an expression that's probably a Middle Eastern expression, actually, that a guest is a gift from God. And and I'm just kind of curious, getting back to food for a second, do you have any favorite foods, do you remember the smells,do you remember how to make them
53:27 - 55:00
LM:  So my grandmother, Vartanoush, my mother's mother, was a phenomenal baker. She was I mean, even in town when she would make a tray of paklava and bring it to the church, you know, for an event or whatever people would fight over who would buy, and they wouldn't buy it by the piece.They would buy the tray. And she did that as a cottage business, sort of out of her house. She did a lot of like catered on the pastry side. She would cater like baby showers and wedding showers and that sort of thing. So her paklava dough, she made her own dough, she stretched it herself, her hands would shake, and the dough never had a rip or a tear in it. And you could read the newspaper through her dough. It was amazing. So I, I would love to have learned how to do that. My sister was able to get her to agree partially to her learning how to make this bread that very few people make that.  And my sister still makes it to this day. But my grandmother didn't know how to read or write in any language, so none of her recipes were written down.They were all in her head. And if you tried to write what she was doing, she'd get mad at you. So you've got to learn it the way I learned it. You've got to learn it from the feel. You've got to learn it, keep it in your head. And it's that's hard for us to do so. But that bread survived because my sister found it.
55:00
GJ: What’s the bread?
55:01 - 55:55
LM: It's a it's a bread called paghach. And so it's a that's a Turkish word, but it's like a flaky bread that has walnuts, crushed walnuts in it. And my sister's tastes like my grandmother's. But she made a lot of things. So it would be hard to pick out a favorite. She-she kept for us and we've sort of modified it, but the tradition alive that for New Years she would make the fortune bread. We would all get our individual breads, but then she'd have the big one and she'd hide a dime in it. And whoever got the dime had luck for the, financial luck for the year. So, you know, we had all those traditions. She made bastegh. I mean, she made so many things that were that a lot of people don't make anymore that we wish we had learned her methods for doing.
55:57
GJ: But your dad worked at the shop. You-both of your grandparents worked at the shop, which is Whitin Machine Works.
56:03
LM: And both my parents worked at the shop. And both of your parents worked for the shop.
56:05
GJ: And your dad had risen to be a manager and ran the Arcade where I had a brief...
56:15
LM: He he not only ran, he was responsible for the building the Arcade.
56:19 - 56:32
GJ: Yeah. Which is a machine shop. Can you tell me a little bit about your dad's progression through Whitin Machine Works and kind of how he became a manager and when?
56:32 - 57:40
LM: I, I don't know all the details, but he, he, I think he would have gone to college if his father hadn't died his senior year of high school. He was a very intelligent man, especially with math and those kinds of things. So he ended up training to be the mechanical drawing person for the shop. He apprenticed into that and he then found himself in the methods department. So that's where he really learned all the manufacturing methodology for the shop. But he also could do all the mechanical drawings of the machinery, etc. And that's how that my parents met by the way, my mother was a stenographer. She had learned stenography in high school and she was working as the stenographer in the department, in the methods department. Even though they grew up -- him on Border Street and her on D Street, they were seven years apart and they didn't really know each other until they met at the shop.
57:42 - 59:30
LM: So anyways, Dad, really, his career really started to take off as the Whitin family was letting go of the day to day operations of the shop and when it was sold to White Consolidated, a lot of the favoritism, nepotism that had existed in the shop.Those rules have started to fall away. And my father was lucky enough to have been sort of mentored by a couple of men in the shop who really kept -- as they moved up, they kept him moving up with him, with them. And when White Consolidated started buying a lot of factories in the south. My father, I was a young child. My father started being sent to these places to convert those new factories into the White Consolidated manufacturing methodology. And so my dad would-would agree to do these long business trips if they would bring him home every weekend so we could see him once a week. So he was flying in a Learjet. So now my dad was a six foot six and a half inch Armenian man.

Very unusual. And he couldn't stand up in these Lear jets. They were so small, but he would do that so that we would see him. He'd be in Alabama, he'd be all over the South. And they would occasionally ask him from headquarters out in the Midwest, we want to make you a plant manager. You gotta move your family to Alabama or Nashville or these places, and he'd bring that offer home to my mother.
59:30 - 01:00:38
LM: My mother would say, Are there Armenians there? And he'd say, No, We're not going. And that happened over and over again. But so he-he passed up opportunities could have it really accelerated because she was holding out for either an opportunity to stay in town or someplace where there were Armenians and by the time he was sent to do that work in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where my mother's sister lived and her brother lived, that it when they offered him the chance, it sort of made sense. And so we put it to a family vote. And that was when he jumped from being on a local payroll to being on the corporate payroll. So he became a White Consolidated Industries corporate employee, and he was the vice president of manufacturing for Bullard, and he helped them build like their Arcade, like what we have here, there. And he was the last one to lock the doors when they sold that factory.
01:00:40
GJ: So the Armenians in Whitinsville pretty much came up through the foundry.
01:00:45
LM: He never worked in foundry.
01:00:46
GJ: Yeah but I mean the generation before him.
01:00:46
LM: Yes. Yeah.
01:00:48
GJ: And then eventually I remember when Beverly's dad, Mr. Naroian became president, everybody was so proud.
01:00:59
LM: That was after Dad had left.
01:01:02
GJ: That the Armenians.
01:01:03
LM: But Ira was… Ira and my father worked really close. Ira Maghakian was the man who
01:01:10
GJ: … mentored your dad, and John Tosoonian?
01:01:15 - 01:01:57
LM: Leo Tosoonian. Leo and Ira were like, they were younger than Dad, so they like Dad was moved up and then they would backfill. And then when Dad finally moved away, then they. Leo took Dad's job and Ira moved up ahead. And then eventually that happened. But they were as far as I know, I think they all those jobs were still local Whitin Machine Works jobs.The reason Dad uprooted, our family moved was it was a chance to put him on corporate payroll. He was going to get stock options, you know he was going to get all the deal.
01:01:57
GJ: So you your dad owned a pub in town, right, called Punjab’s?
01:02:00
LM: He did
01:02:02
GJ: And Punjab was his nickname.
01:02:04 - 01:02:42
LM: He got that name in sixth grade when he had a growth spurt. And at the time, Little Orphan Annie was a very popular comic strip. And there was a character named Punjab who was exotic and tall. And so they started calling my father Punjab. In fact, many of my cousins don't know his real name. They called him Uncle Punj. We'd get wedding invitations. Mr. and Mrs. Punjab Misakian. My mother would get so mad, she goes, They don't even know his name. Now, my father's nieces and nephews only know him as Uncle Archie, but yeah.
1:02:43
GJ: So you have a younger sister, and younger brother. You guys grew up in East Street and then moved to Connecticut. What was it like when you moved to Connecticut?
01:02:55 - 01:04:12
LM: Shocking. Shocking. But, you know, for me, I was it was the summer before my senior year of high school. And it was a totally different life than what we had lived here, even though we had first cousins in town, they were on the other side of town. And so with my mother not driving and me not driving yet, it was it was hard. But, you know, I only had to put up with that for a year and then I went to college.  So but it was a good entree for me because I had to explain what it was to be an Armenian. We learned how many of our vocabulary words were very specific to either Whitinsville or this area of Massachusetts. We'd be mocked for our accent. Karen and I talk about like-we went to school our first day. We're asking like, where's the bubbler? What? Where's the bubbler? We we asked if we could go to the basement and they're going, Why do you want to go to the basement? Cause that's where the bathrooms were in Clark school and that's what you would ask permission to do. And people would be like, What?
1:04:13
GJ: Yeah, throwback.
01:04:16 - 01:04:40
LM: So it was it was a huge shock. You know, remember, my parents had only ever lived in this town. My grandmother had only ever lived in this town, and she came with us. So for her, it was the most heartbreaking because she was leaving behind her friends. And even though she was going to be with her grandchildren, it was, it was hard.
01:04:40
GJ: I bet. Well, we could maybe wrap this up.
01:04:46
LM: Yeah.
01:04:48
GJ: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we end it
01:04:52 - 01:06:31
LM: You know, I think just I'd like to, you know, say that for me, when this project first surfaced the broader project, I had just really dove in deep on my ancestry and I was like, this would be kind of interesting. And for me, the most interesting part of working on this project has been talking to so many people about what we've just spent the last hour or so talking and learning how many people I'm connected to in this town that I didn't know I was connected to. And I think that's kind of fun. It's a fun journey, and I always felt close to Whitinsville.   I mean, we left living in this town, but we never, you know, left loving this town. So we made we've made over the 50 years many, many trips. And my sister recently decided to relocate and she… she closed on her house here on the 50th anniversary date of our move from this town. And I, when she was offered the chance to pick a closing date, she picked that day and I said, It's symbolic. And I think you'll find among people who spent time in this town this closeness of community, even though there weren't nearly as many people from the same villages as my grandparents, they came to feel very close to other people in this town. And now we're learning there they may never have even realized that they had relatives in this town. And I think that's kind of fun.
01:06:32
GJ: It is cool.  Well, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for your time. Great stories.

Creator

Contributor

Date

Coverage

Format

Publisher

Rights

Relation

Type

Duration

Transcriber

Subtitler

Videographer