LOOKING FOR THE ARMENIANS: Eli Smith's Missionary Adventure, 1830-1831

By Margaret R. Leavy

In the early spring of 1830, the author's great-grandfather, Eli Smith, a twenty-nine year old farmer's son from Northfield, Connecticut set out with another young missionary on what turned out to be a sixteen-month journey, largely on horseback, across the Ottoman Turkish Empire onto the borderlands of Russia and Persia and back. Smith's book, Researches in Armenia, published in Boston in 1833 and now out of print, as well as his journal were the principal sources the upon which the author drew for this account.

The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992)