Tatous Thadeus Gugas Kizerian

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Tatous Thadeus Gugas Kizerian: From Zara to Utah

A Son of Gugas in Zara

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.

Marriage to Flora Sherinian

Around 1884, when he was about twenty, Tatous married Flora Kirkor Sherinian, a daughter of Zara born in 1868, about five years younger than he. Her second name, Kirkor, followed the same custom as his own.

Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1885 and named Vartonoosh Tatous Kizerian, and she died in her first year. Carrying her father's name as her own second name, she began the family as the old custom required, and her death in infancy must have marked the young couple's earliest years together. Infant deaths were painfully common in the towns of Anatolia then,[17][18] but frequency did not make them easier to bear.

More children followed: Macruby Marie in 1887, Aunna in 1890, Karlos in 1892, and Turza in 1894. Aunna died in 1892, at about two, the same year Karlos was born. By his early thirties Tatous had buried two daughters and was raising three living children, a weight of loss and responsibility that shaped the household long before the events that would drive it from Zara.

The Zara Branch, 1895

On 28 February 1895, at the age of 31, Tatous was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a member of the Zara Branch.

Latter-day Saint missionaries had been working in the Ottoman Empire since the mid-1880s, and most of their converts came from the Armenian communities of Anatolia.[19][20][21] A branch in a town like Zara would have been small, a handful of families meeting under the leadership of local members and visiting missionaries. For an Armenian in Zara, leaving the Armenian Church meant stepping outside the institution that defined his community, and converts often faced disapproval from neighbors, clergy and even relatives.[19][11][22] Tatous was a grown man with a wife, children and generations of family ties in the town when he made that choice, and the message clearly resonated deeply enough for him to accept those costs.

The timing placed him in the middle of one of the most dangerous periods in Armenian history. Between 1894 and 1896, waves of massacres swept the Armenian population of the eastern Ottoman provinces, and the province of Sivas was struck in the autumn of 1895, only months after his baptism.[23][24][25] Tens of thousands of Armenians were killed across the empire in those years, and those who survived lived with the knowledge that the government would not protect them.[26][23][27]

In 1896 his younger brother Khachig died at about thirty. How he died is not known.

New Names, New Losses

After the baptism, the names Tatous and Flora gave their children began to change in a way that is easy to see. The sons born in the following years were Caleb, born in 1897, Mical in 1898, and Ephraim in 1902, each carrying Thadeus as his second name. These were biblical names, and Ephraim held special meaning in Latter-day Saint teaching about the house of Israel. The old Armenian custom of the father's name remained, now joined to names drawn from the scriptures of a newly embraced faith.

Caleb died in 1898 at about one year old, and Mical died in 1900 at about two. Two sons in two years was a heavy blow on top of the earlier loss of two daughters. By the turn of the century Tatous and Flora had laid four of their seven children to rest.

In 1902, the year Ephraim was born, Tatous's mother, Goola, died in Zara. His son Everett arrived in 1905. Tatous was then in his early forties, with a household that spanned grown children and an infant, still living in the town where his family had always lived, and where the danger to people of his faith and nation had not gone away.

Leaving Turkey in 1906

In 1906, when he was about 42, Tatous emigrated to the United States, driven out by religious persecution from the Turkish government. That simple statement covers a decision that reshaped every generation after him. He left behind his father, Gugas, then in his seventies, his surviving brothers and sisters, the graves of four children, and the town that had been the Kizerians' home for well over a century.

Leaving was not easy for Armenians in those years. Ottoman authorities often made emigration difficult, and Armenians who left were frequently required to give up their Ottoman nationality and promise never to return.[28][29][30] Emigrants from the interior usually travelled overland to a coastal port, crossed to a Mediterranean or European harbor, and then made the long Atlantic voyage in crowded steerage before taking the train across the American continent. For a man in middle age with a family, such a journey required weeks of travel, careful management of limited money, and a determination to start over in a country whose language he did not yet speak. For a Latter-day Saint,[19][31][32] the destination was clear: Utah, the gathering place of the Saints, where a small number of Armenian converts had already settled.[19][33][31]

His daughter Ruth Mary, born in 1907, was the first of his children born after the emigration. Her name marks a turning point. She and the children who came after her, Virginia Flora, Luke Lincoln and Moroni David, carried American and scriptural second names rather than their father's name. The centuries-old Armenian naming custom that had shaped every Kizerian name up to then did not cross the ocean intact. Ruth Mary died in 1908, at about one year old. Even in the new country, the family's grief followed them.

A New Life in Murray

By 1910, Tatous and Flora were living in Murray Ward 1, in Salt Lake County, Utah, where the census taker recorded him as Tadious Kizerian. Murray was then a small industrial city south of Salt Lake City, built up around large smelters that processed ore from the surrounding mountains and drew many immigrant families seeking work.[34][35] For a family from Zara, it must have been a striking change: smokestacks and rail lines instead of an Anatolian town, English replacing Armenian and Turkish in the streets, and a ward congregation where his faith was the majority, not a persecuted minority. Tatous had to learn a new language and new ways of making a living in his mid-forties, a challenge most immigrants of his age faced with modest means and little cushion.

His eldest sibling, Hagna, died in 1910.

Virginia Flora was born in 1909 and Luke Lincoln in 1911. The name Lincoln, belonging to the president who had come to stand for American freedom, sits beside a family history shaped by the denial of it. Utah birth certificates from these years carry his name, spelled once as Tadeus Kizerian and once as Tadouse Kizarian.

The Temple in 1912

On 30 January 1912, at the age of 48, Tatous received his endowment in Salt Lake City. The endowment is among the most sacred ordinances of the Latter-day Saint faith, performed only in temples, and none existed anywhere near Zara.[19][36][20] Seventeen years separated his baptism in a small branch in the Ottoman interior from this day in Salt Lake City, and between them lay massacres, the deaths of children, the loss of his mother, and an emigration across half the world. Entering the temple must have felt like the completion of a journey he had begun in 1895.

That same year his father, Gugas, died in Zara. Tatous was an ocean away, in a new life his father would never see. In 1913, when Tatous was about fifty, his last child, Moroni David, was born. Moroni is a name from the Book of Mormon, and to give it to a son born the year after his endowment shows how fully his faith had become part of his family's identity.

Grief Across Two Worlds

In 1915, three of his siblings died: his brothers Hohones and Kirkor and his sister Sarig. That was the year Ottoman authorities deported and killed the Armenian population of the Sivas region along with Armenians throughout Anatolia, destroying communities like Zara that had existed for centuries.[37][38] How these three siblings died is not known. Whatever their fates, the town Tatous had left nine years earlier was, as an Armenian homeland, essentially gone, and the emigration he had undertaken under persecution stands out sharply in the light of what followed.

Loss came to his Utah household as well. His son Ephraim died in 1918, at about sixteen. That was the year influenza swept through Utah and the world;[39][40] what caused Ephraim's death is not known.[39][40] In 1927 his son Everett died at about twenty-two, and Everett's death certificate names his father as Tadius G. Kizerian. Losing two sons on the edge of adulthood, after the four children buried in Zara and the infant Ruth Mary in Utah, meant that Tatous experienced grief in nearly every stage of his life as a father. His sister Yagna died in 1932.

Later Years in Utah

The children who lived grew up as Americans. Karlos, Turza, Virginia, Luke and Moroni all lived well past their father, several into the late twentieth century. They reached adulthood speaking English, marrying in Utah and raising families in a country where the name Kizerian was unfamiliar, and as they did, Tatous became the bridge between Zara and their American lives.

His name gave Utah's clerks no end of trouble. Over the years they recorded him as Tatonse, Tatius, Thadouse, Talouse, Tatens, Tadeus, Thaddaus, Thadeaus, Tadious, Thaddius and Taddeus Kezerian, among other spellings. Each version is a clerk's attempt to capture a name pronounced with an Armenian accent, and taken together they trace an immigrant's long negotiation with a new country's paperwork. He also appears in the Social Security files created after 1936, under the name Thadius K. Kizerian. By then in his seventies, the man born under the sultan had become part of the records of the American state.

Death in Provo, Burial in Price

Tatous Thadeus Gugas Kizerian died on 9 July 1945 in Provo, Utah, at the age of 81. He was buried three days later, on 12 July 1945, in Price, Carbon County, Utah. He died in the final summer of the Second World War, a man who had lived through the massacres of the 1890s, the destruction of Armenian Anatolia, and two world wars, and who had spent nearly forty years in his adopted country. His grave in Price lies more than six thousand miles from the Zara cemetery where his parents and grandparents were buried.

Flora, his wife of about sixty years, survived him by two years and died in Salt Lake City in 1947. She had shared every part of his journey: the children born and buried in Zara, the conversion, the emigration, and the new life in Utah.

Legacy

The story of Tatous Kizerian can be read in his family's names. He was born Tatous Gugas, a name that tied him to his father, and through Thaddeus, to the beginnings of Armenian Christianity. His first daughter's official patronymic echoed his own given name, a form rooted more in Soviet-era paperwork than in older family custom. After his baptism came Caleb, Mical and Ephraim; after the emigration came Ruth Mary, Virginia Flora and Luke Lincoln; and after the temple came Moroni David. In a single family the names move from Zara to the scriptures to America, recording what he gained and what he left behind.

His life was marked by grief. Seven of his thirteen children died before he did. Yet he kept moving forward, from the Zara Branch to Murray Ward 1, from a persecuted minority faith to the Salt Lake Temple, and from the town his family had known since 1780 to a new home where his descendants would grow up free of the dangers that had driven him out.

Nearly half a century after his death, when his son Luke Lincoln died in 1993, the obituary named his father in full as Thadeus Gugas Kizerian. After all the clerks who had misspelled it, the full name, including the name of his father, Gugas, still survived in the family.

In this biography: 18% sourced history · 48% our reasoning · 5% general background · 30% from your ancestor's records