This photo comes from my great-grandfather's photo album, where he captioned it: "When the Missionaries First Came Home". I wasn't sure who the missionaries were, or if the moniker was serious or tongue-in-cheek, until I recently fit together several pieces of information.
On the upper right is my great-grandfather, Marshall H. Williams, age 18. His brother Harrison stands in front of him and sister Mary stands nearby. At the center of the group is their stepmother, Elizabeth Tuckley Williams. Their father, Frederick H. Williams was almost certainly behind the camera.
The woman on the left is Jane Tuckley, Elizabeth's sister, and the gentleman is Rev. Ernest A. Yarrow. Their three children are George, Grace, and Clarence.
I am fairly certain that the older woman on the right is Mary S. Smith Tuckley - Elizabeth and Jane's mother.
Now for the story:
While Fred and Elizabeth were on their wedding trip in June 1903, they stayed for a night in East Granby, CT with "Sime" Yarrow (Fred's spelling). This puzzled me for a while until I learned that Ernest was called "Syme" by all of his friends.
"Jennie" Tuckley and "Syme" Yarrow were married in August 1904, on her twenty-first birthday. Wedding announcements mention that they already had plans to embark for Van, Turkey-in-Asia as part of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions immediately following the wedding. They sailed from Boston a week later and reached Van at the end of September. While there, Ernest mostly worked with the school which would become Van College (he would become its President). George, Grace, and Clarence were all born there.
The American Board's procedure seemed to be to send missionaries somewhere for seven or eight years at a time, and then give them a year of leave. Thus, the Yarrow family returned to the U.S. in June 1912. My great-great-grandfather writes in his diary: "June 8. Jane Yarrow and three children landed in New York returning from Armenia after nearly eight years absence from America. E.T.W. met her and visited in Newark. Jane and family arrived in Binghamton June 27." This dates the photograph to the winter of 1912-13. Marshall was a freshman at Yale at the time, so this would have been during a holiday break.
Some of the Yarrow's colleagues from Van also visited the Tuckleys and Williamses in Binghamton.
In October 1908, Dr. Clarence D. Ussher, his wife Elizabeth (Barrows) Ussher, and their four children visited for two days while on their own year-long furlough. Dr. Ussher visited again the following June, staying with Fred and Elizabeth Williams. Fred - a history teacher - writes that he was "intensely interested in accounts of his experiences among Turks, Kurds, Russians, etc."
In March 1914, Dr. George C. Raynolds paid a visit. He and his wife had established the mission in Van in 1872, and still worked there.
The Yarrow family returned to Van in July 1913, and were witnesses to the atrocities committed against the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. They remained through the 1915 Siege of Van, and fled the city for Russia later that year. The journal I have from Fred stops in 1914, so I don't know what he might have recorded about those events. I'll also leave the story here.
Further reading:
- American Board pamphlet about Ernest Yarrow, partly authored by Jane Tuckley Yarrow
- "Relief Workers in the Near East", The Christian Advocate, 2 Sept 1920, p1190
- "Seven 'Good Samaritans' in Armenia 1915-1917", from 168 Hours
- Ernest Yarrow on Wikipedia
- The Siege of Van on Wikipedia
Additional Sources:
American Board Personnel Cards for Ernest A. Yarrow and Jane Tuckley Yarrow
Family papers
