Stanley Kerr was the son of a Presbyterian minister and was an inactive member of the Army . A clinical biochemist at Walter Reed Hospital , he left the United States in 1919 to serve as a volunteer for Near East Relief , an American charity created to help the Armenians . Kerr began his service in Aleppo during an Armenian refugee crisis when many of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide had escaped . He worked as a medical and sanitary officer who cared for the survivors of the march of refugees through the desert . He also worked to recover Armenian children from the Kurdish and Turkoman families into which they had been forced . In 1921 Stanley and Elsa Reckman joined the staff of a Near East Relief orphanage for Armenian children at Nahr Ibrahim , Lebanon . One of the Armenian refugees was as a flower girl in their wedding in 1922 . The orphanage was abandoned in 1923 due to a typhoid outbreak
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Stanley Kerr