So tell us just about your grandfather.

What was his name?

Where was he born?

Who was he?

Well, to us, we called him Baba, which was my mother called him for father.

But we also called him that.

But his name, formally to other people, was Stepan Mischjian.

This is Don Anaheid McKean.

Her grandfather was born in the late 1880s and lived in what was then the Ottoman Empire.

He was Armenian from a town in what is now Turkey called Adabazar, not far from Constantinople, which of course

is now Istanbul. Now, I also want to tell you about my grandfather's personality. He was really funny.

He was so mischievous. He would call up his friends in the middle of the day and tell them,

oh, you know, we're having a meeting. you must come now, and they all would leave work,

and, you know, he would get there waiting for this meeting to begin, and he would pass out,

you know, ice cream and coffee to everyone. And he would make up languages in the middle of a crowd

just to see, to watch people try to guess what languages was. And so he constantly knew how to reinvent himself.

I think it was that power of reinvention that really helped him later survive what would

happen during the genocide. Dawn's grandfather, Stepan, was 28 years old when World War I started.

Armenians were a Christian minority in the Ottoman Empire.

And as the Ottoman struggled on the battlefield,

nationalist leaders intensified their branding of Armenians as traitors.

Millions of Armenians were deported from their homes

...