A four-generation migration through six countries — from the late Ottoman Empire, through the massacres and wars of the early 20th century, to a chance meeting in Toronto, Canada — told through the people who lived it.
I'm Joseph Achakji. I started this archive in 2026, sitting at my desk in Ottawa with a stack of handwritten family tree photographs and a feeling that if someone didn't write this down, much of it would be lost.
The story that follows is a chronicle of two families — the Achakjis on my father's side, the Boghossians on my mother's — and how their generations carried them, separately, through six countries before meeting in Toronto. Most of what I know came from my parents — my father holding the Achakji memory, my mother holding the Boghossian. Some of it is verified by documents. Much of it is family memory, which is its own kind of truth.
Because the families branched at every generation, this archive will read differently to different relatives. If you are descended from George and Josephine, your ancestors are at the center of every chapter. If you are a cousin from another branch of the family, you'll find your own ancestors named throughout — sometimes in the spotlight, sometimes in the margins. Either way, the story is yours too.
This is a living document. As family members read it and add what they remember, it will grow more complete. Corrections, additions, and forgotten details are all welcome — that's how an archive becomes an archive.
— Joseph Achakji, Ottawa, 2026
The story begins around the 1840s, in the dying decades of the Ottoman Empire. Two unrelated families are quietly establishing themselves — one Armenian, one Syrian — entirely unaware that their descendants will one day meet.
In the highlands of Armenia, Boghos Boghossian is building a household. He marries twice in his lifetime. The first marriage — to a woman whose name is now lost to time — produces six children: Rizkallah, Nasrie, Hovanes, Saede, Farag, and Farida. It is from Rizkallah's line, not from Boghos's later wife Nargeza Melkonian, that the Boghossian line of this archive descends.
Meanwhile, in the Levant, the Kouchakji family is raising a son named Mickail. The records grow thin this far back — we know Mickail existed, and that he would eventually have a son named Youssef who built his life in Egypt. Where exactly Mickail himself was born and raised is uncertain; family memory points to Syria, but it has not been confirmed. Of his parents, his wife, and his daughters-in-law's parents, almost nothing survives.
In Armenia, two daughters are born to a Khatchadourian household in the late 1800s. They are sisters: Mary, the elder, and Leia, the younger. They will leave Armenia separately — and two generations later, their lines will converge in a granddaughter, born in Egypt. Her parents will call her Fina.
To understand why they left, it helps to understand what was happening to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The 1890s were catastrophic: the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1896, ordered by Sultan Abdülhamid II, killed an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians and orphaned roughly 50,000 children. It was, in the words of one historian, a "dress rehearsal" for the full Genocide that would follow two decades later. Then came the Adana Massacres of 1909, which killed tens of thousands more Armenians in Cilicia.
Many Armenian families read the writing on the wall and left before the situation deteriorated further. Mary Khatchadourian appears to have been among them — she had already settled in the Levant by the time her son Naguib was born in Syria in 1905. Leia made her way to Iraq. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914 and the Genocide began in 1915, the sisters and their families were already established outside Armenia — sparing them the horrors of the death marches into the Syrian desert.
Mary's son was named Naguib. Leia's daughter was named Wadia. They were first cousins — children of two sisters — though raised in different countries, speaking different surrounding languages, separated by hundreds of miles. Neither could have predicted that they would one day meet, fall in love, and marry. The Khatchadourian sisters' children became husband and wife.
Naguib was born in Syria in 1905. Wadia was born in Iraq in 1912. They were first cousins — but they grew up apart, in different countries, in the chaos of an empire dissolving around them.
How they met is its own story, lost to family memory. What we know is that they married, settled in Egypt, and had four children — Joseph's mother Josephine among them, alongside Heno, Fouad, and another daughter named Mary (named, perhaps, after her grandmother).
Cousin marriages were not unusual in close-knit Middle Eastern and Armenian diaspora communities of that era. After the upheavals of the late Ottoman period — the massacres of the 1890s and 1909, then the Genocide and the First World War — families often turned inward, marrying within trusted kinship networks to preserve identity, language, and faith.
While the Khatchadourian sisters were settling into Syria and Iraq, another migration was quietly unfolding on the paternal side. The Kouchakji family was making its way through the Levant toward Egypt, where it would eventually become the Achakjis.
Mickail Kouchakji, born around the 1870s — likely in Syria, though the exact origin remains a question for the family to confirm — raised a son named Youssef who was born in Egypt in 1901. Egypt, under British administration, had become a magnet for Levantine merchants, professionals, and Christian minorities seeking stability and opportunity. Cairo and Alexandria became cosmopolitan crossroads — French-speaking, polyglot, and relatively tolerant.
Youssef grew up there and married Marie Kozma, a Lebanese woman whose family had also emigrated to Egypt. Marie's father, Kozma, brought yet another Levantine thread into the weave — and her arrival quietly added Lebanon to the family's roster of origin countries.
Together, Youssef and Marie raised a large family: Michael, George, Victoria, Edward, and eventually George Youssef Achakji — Joseph's father — born in 1946.
By 1946, both families had ended up in Egypt — separately, by different routes. That same year, within months of each other, two children were born in the same Egyptian neighborhood. They would grow up blocks apart. And they would never meet.
On the Achakji side: Youssef and Marie's son George Youssef Achakji was born in 1946 — Syrian-Lebanese roots, Egyptian birth.
On the Boghossian side: Naguib and Wadia's daughter Josephine Naguib Boghossian was born in 1946 — Armenian-Iraqi roots, Egyptian birth.
Five countries — Armenia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt — had funneled their threads into a single year and place. George and Josephine were both Egyptian-born children of immigrant families, raised in the cosmopolitan world of mid-century Cairo and Alexandria, speaking French and Arabic, attending Christian schools, surrounded by other Levantine diaspora families.
And here is the detail that turns the whole story into something out of a novel: they lived only a few blocks from each other. Same neighborhood. Same streets. Same shops, almost certainly. They may have walked past each other a hundred times — at the market, on the way to school, at a neighborhood church — without ever speaking. They didn't meet.
For all that geography did to bring their families together, it couldn't quite finish the job. The story still had one more migration to make before they would meet — and they would have to cross an ocean to do it.
Egypt was where the families converged geographically. But the actual romance — the meeting that made the next generation possible — happened thousands of kilometres away, in Toronto. And it happened because of one woman: Aunt Mary.
In the 1950s, two of Josephine's siblings — Heno and Aunt Mary — left Egypt for Canada. They were the trailblazers. The post-war decades were a difficult time for Christian minorities in Egypt, especially after the 1956 Suez Crisis and the rise of Arab nationalism under Nasser. Many Levantine and Armenian families who had built lives in Cairo and Alexandria began looking elsewhere — to Lebanon, to France, to North America.
Aunt Mary found work with Canadian immigration. From inside the system, she became a one-woman family-reunification engine: sponsoring her relatives, navigating the paperwork, opening the door for one Boghossian after another to follow her to Toronto.
Josephine arrived in June 1969. Within months, the family went through one of those concentrated bursts of change that happen in immigrant communities. In September 1969, Aunt Mary herself met Armenak Sarkissian in Toronto; six months later they were married and gone to New York. In December 1969, Heno married Tant Violet, a Palestinian woman — adding yet another origin country to the family's already-extensive list.
And then George arrived. The Achakjis had their own reasons for leaving Egypt and their own path to Toronto. George and Josephine met in the city, fell in love, and married — about 51 years ago. Two families that had grown up parallel in Egypt, without ever crossing paths, finally collided on Bloor Street or Yonge Street or somewhere in between, in a country neither had been born in.
Think about that for a moment. They had spent their entire Egyptian childhoods blocks apart. They had almost certainly walked the same streets, eaten at the same bakeries, attended overlapping community events. And they never met. It took the closing of one country and the opening of another, an aunt's job at immigration, a series of family sponsorships, and a transatlantic move to put them in the same room.
George and Josephine settled into Canadian life. Heno and Tant Violet raised their family in Toronto. Aunt Mary and Armenak Sarkissian built theirs in New York. George's siblings followed their own paths in their own countries. The generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Egypt scattered across the Atlantic world.
Each of those branches produced children of its own. The descendants of Aunt Mary in New York. The children of Heno and Tant Violet, who carry Armenian, Iraqi, and Palestinian heritage all at once. The cousins on other branches of the family. And in Toronto, then Ottawa, the children of George and Josephine — Mary, Joseph, and Christine.
Every one of these descendants carries the same long story encoded in different proportions. Armenian on at least one side, often both — twice through the Khatchadourian sisters on the maternal line, and possibly a third time on the paternal line, if the Kouchakjian hypothesis holds. Syrian through the Kouchakjis. Lebanese through Marie Kozma. Iraqi through Wadia Gharib's father Selim. Palestinian by marriage through Tant Violet. Egyptian by birth or by upbringing. And now Canadian or American, depending on which border the family ended up on.
The grandchildren of refugees who left Armenia before the worst. The great-grandchildren of merchants and traders who built lives across five countries. The nieces and nephews of Aunt Mary, who quietly engineered the family's move across the Atlantic. They build professional lives, raise their own children, and carry — knowingly or not — the weight of the five-country migration that brought them here.
For my own part, I'm one of those grandchildren — a Professional
Engineer in Ottawa, one of George and Josephine's three children.
I never met the great-grandparents this story begins with. I
never saw Armenia or Egypt. But I carry their names, and I'm
the one writing this down. That's how I came to be the archivist
of a story I only partly lived.
— J. A.