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 — told through the people who lived it.
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 a son named Rizkallah. It is from this first wife, not from Boghos's later wife Nargeza Melkonian, that your bloodline descends.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Syria, the Kouchakji family is raising a son named Mickail. The records grow thin this far back — we know Mickail existed, that he was Syrian, and that he would eventually have a son named Youssef. 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 decades later, their grandchildren will marry each other in Toronto.
To understand why they left, you have 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 — Joe'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 Mary and Leia were navigating the aftermath of genocide, another migration was quietly unfolding. The Kouchakji family — Joe's paternal line — was making its way from Syria to Egypt, where it would eventually become the Achakjis.
Mickail Kouchakji, Syrian-born around the 1870s, 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 your bloodline's roster of origin countries.
Together, Youssef and Marie raised a large family: Michael, George, Victoria, Edward, and eventually George Youssef Achakji — Joe'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 you possible — happened thousands of kilometres away, in Toronto. And it happened because of one woman: Joe's 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. Their children — Mary, Joseph, Christine, and Joe — grew up as the first generation born into the new country. Toronto first, then Ottawa, where Joe would eventually settle.
You are the carrier of all of it. Armenian on both sides (twice on your mother's, through the Khatchadourian sisters — and possibly on your father's too, 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 your parents' birthplace. And now Canadian.
You are a P.Eng in Ottawa. The grandchildren of refugees who left Armenia before the worst, the great-grandchildren of merchants and traders who built lives in five countries, the nephew of the woman who quietly engineered an entire family's move across the Atlantic. You build a quiet professional life in a country none of your great-grandparents ever saw.