Mary Louise Graffam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Louise Graffam | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | May 11, 1871 |
| Died | August 17, 1921 (aged 50) |
| Occupation(s) | Christian missionary and witness to the Armenian genocide |
Mary Louise Graffam (May 11, 1871 – August 17, 1921) was an American teacher, high school principal, Christian missionary, and an important witness to the Armenian genocide.[1] In 1915 she was deported and is considered a victim of the Armenian genocide.[1]
Mary Louise Graffam was born in Monson, Maine. Her father was a farmer and her mother died at the age of forty-one shortly after Mary Graffam's graduation from high school. At the age of five, she and her family moved to Andover, Massachusetts.[1]
She was raised in the Christian faith with her sister Winona. As a teenager, a religious experience moved Graffam join the local church and take part in services. While at Oberlin College, a school known for its missionary training, Graffam began studying to become a foreign missionary.[1] After graduating in 1894, she taught in various schools in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington D.C.[2] She failed to go to Japan to become a missionary. However, in 1901 she was sent to Sivas, Ottoman Empire to be in charge of Female Education in the mission post of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions of the village.[1]
When she arrived in the Ottoman Empire, she was thirty-one years old.[1] She eventually became the principal of the girls' high school in Sivas, where she taught algebra and geometry. As a supervisor of schools in the neighboring villages, she was also a teacher of Bible studies and trigonometry at the Sivas Teachers College. She became fluent in Armenian and was conversational in Turkish and French. She kept her post as a teacher until the start of World War I and the eventual culmination of the Armenian genocide.[3]
Shortly after her 50th birthday, Graffam noticed a lump in her breast. She monitored it for six weeks, and finally agreed to have it removed. A Near East Relief (NER) Armenian physician, Dr. Hekimyan, conducted the procedure. Graffam was under the constant care of two NER nurses, and the medical team agreed that her surgery had been successful. Unfortunately, on the fourth day, her fever increased, her pulse was racing, and later she developed acute nephritis. She died four days later. Mary Graffam was much loved and highly respected in her community. Her colleague, Nina Rice, described her funeral as “touching . . . attended by crowds of poor people and orphans, and by government officials and a military escort. The people feel themselves sheep without a shepherd, and we have much to do to keep up their morale.”[4][5]
