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Tatous Thadeus Gugas Kizerian was born on 13 September 1863 in Zara, Sivas, in the Armenian heartland of the Ottoman Empire. His parents, Gugas Hohones Kizerian and Goola Baboog Modoian, were both natives of Zara, and the Kizerian family had lived there at least since his grandfather Hohannes Kachig Kizerian was born in the town in 1780. By the time Tatous arrived, his family had belonged to that one place for three generations.

His name carried a great deal of history. His middle name, Gugas, was his father's name, just as his father's second name, Hohones, echoed the grandfather Hohannes, and his mother's second name, Baboog, was her own father's. Armenian families commonly carried a father's given name as a second name, so a person's full name was a short genealogy, telling the town whose son or daughter he was.[1][2] His first name reached back even further. Tatous and Thadeus are two forms of one name, Thaddeus, the apostle the Armenian Church honors, alongside Bartholomew, as one of the first to bring Christianity to Armenia. For a boy raised in one of the oldest Christian nations,[3][4] it was a name rooted in the founding story of his people.

Tatous was the fourth of eight children recorded for Gugas and Goola. Among them were the eldest, Hagna, born in 1850; his brother Hohones, born in 1859; and four younger siblings: Khachig, born in 1866, Sarig in 1869, Yagna in 1872, and Kirkor in 1878. The family names repeat across the generations. Hohones and Khachig echoed their grandfather Hohannes Kachig, and Sarig shared her name with their paternal grandmother, Sarig Gunashian. The Kizerians appear to have named their children in honor of those who came before them,[5][6] a common practice in Armenian families.

Zara sat in a high upland valley east of the city of Sivas, a region of long, hard winters and short growing seasons.[7][8][9] Armenians made up a large share of its people, living alongside Turkish and Kurdish neighbors under Ottoman rule.[10][7] Under the Ottoman system, Armenians were governed in many civil matters as a religious community, so the Armenian Church shaped far more than Sunday worship.[11][12][13] It kept the calendar of feasts and fasts, held baptisms, weddings and burials, and anchored a family's place in the town.[14][15][16] With eight children spread over almost thirty years, the Kizerian household would have held older siblings caring for younger ones, and Tatous likely spent his boyhood with brothers and sisters both older and younger, all working to keep a household going in a demanding climate.