Monsoura

In April 2017, shortly after the passing of my father's cousin Fred Farewege, the last of his immediate family, his niece Danyse Fusco arrived at my mother's home with an armful of family artifacts from the Farewege family Bible to assorted hand-written family genealogies reaching back into the mid-1800's. What emerged from all this documentation assembled over decades was the inspiring story of Monsoura Thomas, Danyse's great-grandmother and her heroic flight in the summer of 1915 with her four children from certain death in Mardin, a town in the Armenian region of the Ottoman Empire. Her persistence in surviving the Armenian Genocide and Diaspora leads to her arrival in Utica, New York in 1922 among family and within the community of St. Basil's Melkite Church. But this biography is also the story of the support from her extended family in times of need and of her unrelenting Catholic faith.