These items are part of Dickran Toumajan’s family collection. The oldest of the photographs is from Gürün, from which the Toumajan family originated. The family lived in Gürün until 1895, when anti-Armenian pogroms were organized in the city, alongside other parts of the Empire, during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Tovmas Toumajan (Dikran’s grandfather) survived the pogroms by fleeing to the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

After the end of the massacres and the re-establishment of peace, Tovmas Toumajan returned to the Ottoman Empire, and this time, alongside his family, settled in the city of Sepasdia/Sivas. Tovmas was married to Mariam, and they had three sons – Messiah/Hrant (born in 1888), Mihran (born in 1890), and Nishan (born in 1893); and two daughters – Alice/Armaveni (later Minasian) and Lousin (later Sahagian). The three sons received their secondary education at the American Missionaries’ College. Mihran graduated from Anatolia College in Marzevan/Merzifon, and Nshan graduated from the Bithynia Secondary School in Bardizag (presetn-day Bahçecik).

In 1909, the Toumajan family resettled in Istanbul, and established residence in the Üsküdar neighborhood. Mihran, one of the sons, was a great lover of music, and he became soon became very involved in musical endeavors when the renowned musicologist and cleric Gomidas Vartabed came to Istanbul. Under the latter’s tutelage, Mihran Toumajan gained an enormous amount of knowledge, which became the foundation of his future devotion to the field of Armenian music.

By the outbreak of the First World War, Mihran’s brother, Nishan (Dikran’s future father), had already emigrated to the United States, and had settled in the city of Boston. Mihran was in Istanbul, where he was conscripted into the army and sent to Diyarbekir. When the massacres of Armenian soldiers began, Mihran was saved thanks to the intervention of an officer, who arranged for him to be stationed in Aleppo, and told him to never return to Diyarbekir. Later during the war, Mihran escaped into Egypt, which, at the time, was under British mandate.

After the war, alongside many other Armenians, he traveled to Cilicia, where, alongside Parsegh Ganachian (another disciple of Gomidas Vartabed), he performed in choir concerts in Adana. In 1920 he was in Istanbul, again organizing concerts with surviving students of Gomidas Vartabed. After Istanbul, he moved to Paris, where he supplemented his musical education, and then, in 1923, he settled in the United States, joining his two brothers and two sisters. In 1966 he immigrated to Soviet Armenia, where he lived until his death in 1973. In the 1970s, music books written by him were published in Yerevan.

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