The Georgetown Boys: Armenian Survival, Language and Memory in Canada

01 / Beyond the arrival photograph

Who were the Georgetown Boys?

The Georgetown Boys were Armenian child survivors brought to Canada during the 1920s and housed at Cedarvale Farm in Georgetown, Ontario. The Ontario Heritage Trust commemorates 109 boys arriving between 1923 and 1927. Its plaque records an initial group of 50 from an orphanage on Corfu, Greece, reaching the farm on July 1, 1923. English instruction and agricultural training formed part of the settlement programme. By 1928, the boys had been placed with farm families in southwestern Ontario. [1]

Those facts establish a Canadian location and a sequence of events. They cannot, by themselves, describe what survival meant to each child. A group name makes a history recognizable; it can also obscure the different lives gathered beneath it. The name Georgetown tells us where these children were received, rather than where their lives began.

To understand their arrival, begin with the history of the Armenian Genocide and the destruction that made refuge necessary. Then look further back. The communities represented in Exhibit G: Armenian Life Before 1915 remind us that Armenian children belonged to a world of families, schools, churches and skilled work. A survivor’s biography should not begin as though that world had never existed.

Admission was a struggle, not an open door

Historian Daniel Ohanian’s study, Sympathy and Exclusion, examines relocation to Canada against immigration authorities’ resistance to people classified as Asian, impoverished or stateless. His account places humanitarian campaigning inside a system of exclusion, rather than treating sympathy as sufficient to secure admission. The study follows boys, girls and women across the years 1923–1930. [2]

This changes the question we ask of the Canadian response. Who worked to make admission possible? What conditions accompanied it? Whose future did officials imagine when they accepted a child? Recognizing assistance and examining its restrictions belong together. The museum’s Canada’s Response exhibit provides a wider setting for that history.

02 / Identity after displacement

What was at stake in a name?

Jan Raska’s research for the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 describes an attempt to give the boys Canadianized names. His account identifies an administrative list in which Sarkiss Tapandjian became Peter Tapandjian Robinson and Hagop Abrahamian became James Abrahamian Gourlay. Raska also describes the children’s opposition, reported by the association’s general secretary in 1925, and the subsequent lapse of the imposed naming practice. [3]

A name can carry a relationship when the person who first spoke it is absent. For children separated from family and homeland, retaining it could preserve a continuity that official paperwork did not adequately explain. This is an interpretation of why the documented dispute matters; it is not a claim to know every boy’s private thoughts.

The records also demand care with later choices. In his earlier research on Armenian-Ontarian community life, Ohanian notes both opposition to renaming and the later use of English names by some of the boys. A person’s decision in adulthood should not be confused with an institution’s earlier attempt to rename a child. [4] Neither should a later English name be treated as proof that Armenian identity had disappeared.

This attention to names connects with a broader responsibility in preserving survivors’ records. A searchable transcription is useful, but the original spelling, date and context remain part of the evidence. Accessibility should help readers approach a record without smoothing away the history it contains.

03 / Children as writers and readers

A newsletter opened another kind of classroom

The Sara Corning Centre for Genocide Education’s Pages from Armenian-Canadian History brings together the surviving English and Armenian Ararat newsletters associated with the boys and their teacher Aris Alexanian. The Centre describes language practice, artwork, short stories, farm news and communication with Armenians abroad as purposes of the publications. It also explains that the modern collection required gathering scattered copies from families, libraries and archives in several countries. [5]

A newsletter changes the position from which we encounter these children. Instead of appearing only as people described by administrators or photographed by visitors, they appear as contributors with subjects to choose, sentences to compose and readers to address. That does not make publication an unmediated window into their lives. It does make their participation visible.

January 1926: three small pieces of evidence

In the first English issue, editor-in-chief Vahe Alexanian introduces a paper intended to express “our plans and our thoughts.” Onnig Shangayan contributes an account of the home’s beginnings and daily work. A school report by Onnig Melkonian describes two classrooms and instruction divided into six grades. Elsewhere, Armenag Kouyoumjian reports that the boys’ Junior Red Cross club supported a younger Armenian child in an orphanage in Jerusalem. These are statements published by the contributors, not independently reconstructed scenes. [6, January 1926, original pp. 1–2, 7]

The subjects are revealing together. The editor claims space for thought; a pupil presents schooling to an outside audience; another writer describes children giving support beyond the farm. Readers can encounter organization, aspiration and mutual responsibility without expecting every contribution to be an account of the Armenian Genocide.

The Jerusalem report is particularly important to the way the story is told. In that published account, children receiving assistance also describe themselves as capable of assisting another child. Their position cannot be reduced to dependence. We should preserve that reported act without turning it into an invented story about a meeting, a friendship or a later outcome that the page does not establish.

Read the page, including its audience

The opening editorial also addresses subscribers and thanks supporters. [6, January 1926, original p. 1] The paper was therefore written for an audience with a relationship to the institution. A positive description may be sincere; its appearance in a public newsletter does not make it a complete assessment of every child’s experience.

That distinction protects the source from two opposite misuses: dismissing the contributors because adults helped produce the paper, or treating every printed statement as the private testimony of the whole group. Read authorship, genre and purpose together. A translated tale, an editorial and a school report answer different historical questions. Our study of Aurora Mardiganian’s testimony and its presentation offers another route into the relationship between a survivor’s voice and the form through which audiences receive it.

05 / Evidence, not a single tidy story

Why do the sources give different totals?

The provincial commemoration identifies 109 boys. Ohanian’s later study discusses 110 boys and 39 girls and women in a wider migration project. A research database introduced by the Corning Centre in 2025 covers approximately 130 boys and 40 girls and women across several named groups, including the Georgetown, Fegan’s, Salvation Army and Newham groups. [1] [2] [7]

These figures should not be combined into a new total. The database has broader stated coverage; the difference between 109 and 110 also requires examination of the underlying individual records before it can be explained conclusively. This feature does not claim to have completed that reconciliation.

The girls and women in the wider migration record deserve attention in their own right. Their presence must not be absorbed into a boys’ farm narrative simply because a familiar group name is convenient. Research should follow their documented routes and circumstances separately. The museum’s Women & The Genocide exhibit offers a broader starting point for considering Armenian women’s survival and historical visibility.

06 / Preservation as a responsibility

Keep the ordinary pages, too

Remembrance often concentrates on a small number of striking images or quotations. The Ararat collection invites a slower approach: retain the issue, identify the contributor, read neighbouring items and distinguish a contemporary account from a later recollection. An ordinary school report can preserve something that a commemorative summary cannot—the way a child chose to explain his present.

For family researchers, a useful record includes the source location, date, page, author and spelling actually found there. Keep a scan alongside a transcription when permission allows. Mark uncertain readings. If a later source corrects a date, retain a note explaining the change. These practices make future correction possible without pretending that every uncertainty has already been settled.

Educators can begin with one newsletter page rather than asking students to summarize an entire childhood. Who wrote it? What kind of text is it? Who was expected to read it? Which claims could be checked elsewhere? Such questions support careful reading without asking students to imagine themselves as victims or compose fictional survivor testimony. The museum’s Teacher Resources and Survivor Testimonials exhibit provide further paths for study.

The Georgetown history belongs to Armenian remembrance and to Canadian public history. Keeping those responsibilities together means acknowledging refuge while preserving the children’s identities, words and prior losses. Their lives were not completed by an arrival date. The surviving pages allow us to approach them as people who continued learning, making decisions and addressing a world beyond the farm.