Starting Over

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My name is Francine Tashjian, daughter of Alice and granddaughter of Frances, whose story is told in Alice’s book, Silences: My Mother’s Will to Survive. While her brother Hamazasb was sent to America before the Genocide, Frances remained behind in their home city of Sepastia. She was the only member of the family to survive the death march.

After the war, Frances found work as a teacher in an American orphanage run by Sophie Holt, a missionary from Duluth, Minnesota. Eventually she made contact with Hamazasb, who paid for her journey to Binghamton, New York. There she married Levon Franguelian (Leon Frank), who, like Hamazasb, had been sent from Sepastia to America as a young man. I am holding their 1921 wedding portrait.

The successful owner of a dry cleaning business and a liquor store, Levon was also an excellent photographer. Having lost all his family during the Genocide, he and Frances raised three children, ten grandchildren, and twenty great-grandchildren.