PAPER TRAIL ARMENIAN HEIRS TRY TO DOCUMENT THEIR LOSS.

Byline: Alex Dobuzinskis Staff Writer

The American missionary wrote his notes on a small tag, trying to keep track of the Armenian families he had come to know and whom he was powerless to save as they were deported.

``Pallanjian and family have not been heard from since leaving Platana June, 28, 1915,'' the Rev. Lyndon S. Crawford wrote in his notes, which he later sent to store owner Hagop Palanjian's surviving brother.

While the missionary may not have known what was happening to all the Armenians he knew, some of whom like Hagop Palanjian entrusted him with jewelry and other property when they were forced from their homes in Trabizond, he knew what was happening in some parts of the Ottoman Empire.

``All reports agree that no men got beyond Erzinghan - all killed,'' wrote Crawford.

Decades after an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died in the Ottoman Empire, thousands of personal documents are being filed in a downtown Los Angeles office as part of the $20 million settlement of a class action lawsuit against New York Life, which insured some of the dead.

Missionaries' notes and letters, family photos, birth certificates and other items provide a glimpse into the lives of the Armenian families affected by the deaths of friends and relatives from 1915 to the early 1920s.

For many of the Armenian claimants, the personal documents are a reminder of organized mass murder that the governments of the United States and Turkey have not acknowledged.

``These documents that I got - cards, letters, whatever - (were) sent by foreign missionaries, American missionaries, and I kept it for future purposes. It's a proof,'' said claimant Henry Palanjian, 72, whose uncle Hagop is the man Crawford's notes mention as having gone unaccounted for, along with his family.

Palanjian, a Costa Mesa resident, is seeking to collect payment for his uncle's New York Life policy. His is among nearly 4,000 claims, most of them submitted from the United States or Armenia and some of them unknowingly submitted by more than one family member for a single ancestor.

Claimants need not prove their insured relatives were murdered, because the 2004 settlement calls for the company to pay off unpaid claims on policies issued to Armenians from the Ottoman Empire during that era. More than 2,300 policies were issued.

Engin Ansay, the Turkish consul general in Los Angeles, said some Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had received arms from Russia during World War I and were fighting the Turks.

``Missionaries, of course, reported that Armenians were being killed and this should stop,'' Ansay said. ``If I was there, I would have done the same thing, but that does not prove that it was genocide.''

One letter is about American-educated college president Armenag Haigazian, who died in a hospital in 1921 of typhoid following deportation and a stint in an isolation camp.

``He was very quiet and slept a great deal the last few days,'' American Dr. Mark Ward wrote a year later to the professor's widow. ``Sometimes the nurse would hear him singing some of the good old hymns to himself.''

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, said the House International Relations Committee's approval of his resolution calling on Turkey to recognize the deaths as genocide makes him hopeful the full House will do the same.

``Nations around the world have recognized the genocide,'' Schiff said. ``Historians from all around the world have recognized it. The facts are about as clear as they can be, and I think Turkey has taken a political position, not a historical one.''

Among the thousands of documents submitted as part of the New York Life claims process are many intended to show line of descent from an insured individual. They do not attest to whether mass murders occurred, but they illustrate Armenians' lives decades ago under Ottoman rule and later under the rule of the Soviet Union.

One claimant submitted a Soviet workbook owned by a relative who needed the document to work as a teacher. Photos show the shift from traditional to modern ways of life, with more than one family photo showing men wearing fezzes next to relatives wearing Western suits and bow ties.

In one early 20th-century photo, a woman poses for a wedding picture wearing a traditional necklace of gold coins and a white headdress. There are also documents written in Ottoman Turkish, the flowing Arabic writing that Turkey later replaced with Latin letters. Claims have been received from more than 20 countries and with documents in a variety of languages.

The payment of the claims is expected to occur over the next year.

``I'm very pleased that so many personal stories can be told with evidence and with documentation,'' said Paul Krekorian, president of the Burbank school board and a board member for the settlement office.

``Because with a horrible mass crime like this, sometimes you can get lost in the statistics and when you see individual stories of how this impacted on particular families I think it's a very compelling, heart-wrenching story.''

Alex Dobuzinskis, [phone]

alex.dobuzinskis(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Documents from all over the world, including diplomas, letters and photographs, are being sent in by Armenian descendants as part of a settlement with New York Life over deaths in the Armenian genocide.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer