Jennie Garabedian

As a child, Jennie was very quiet. A lot of the information she was able to gain was from what her mother would talk about, which often left her mother and her mother's friends emotional.

"I would sit next to her and so I heard a lot of stories of people in the community that would tell each other those stories. I remember one day my mother was crying and she looked down at me and I was crying. And she said, Why are you crying? And I said, Because you're crying."

While her mother didn't sit down and tell these stories directly to Jennie, she still took a great interest in the place where her mother had come from, and what the village was like. 

"I just listened. I listened all my life. I was so interested in what was going on. I always wanted to see that village. When people used to talk about the old country, I had no idea where that was. I had friends who had a home in Granby, and I used to think, That's the old country. How come they can go there and I can't go there? And this was always a dream of mine to go back and see my mother's village. I had heard so much about it in my life."

Later in life, Jennie did get the opportunity to see her mother's village, where she found her first cousin who was still living there, along with some other Armenian women. Based on all of the stories she had heard, it gave her the drive to reconnect with lost family members and learn more about her mother's life in the place she had always dreamed to see.