Her next set of slides showed the magnificence and disrepair of the Cathedral at Ani, the beauty of the Armenian church at Akhtamar and Armenian pottery and carpets. Next were photographs of Kharpert before 1915, the region where her father’s parents were born.

Slides of the genocide started with men from Kharpert being marched out, under arrest, and Ignatius noted the husband of one of her grandfather’s sisters could have been in that photograph, as he was arrested during the genocide, although she did not know whether he was. Scenes of woman and children in the desert followed, set to haunting duduk music.

Next, images, accompanied by the Pachelbel Canon, showed the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan where mounds of red and white carnations surrounded the eternal flame, and another where Hasan Cemal, the grandson of one of the key perpetrators of the genocide, laid a flower at the Memorial. Several slides of modern-day Armenia rounded out the presentation, including Echmiadzin, the Opera House in Yerevan and Armenian school children playing chess.

She ended the program with a slide about the Armenian national soccer team competing in a World Cup qualifying match against Turkey in 2010, and she played the Armenian National Anthem in the background, as it was heard that day in Turkey when the Armenian team came onto the pitch, nearly 100 years after the Ottoman campaign of extermination.

The program closed with a final slide “We Remember,” carrying a caption about the canonization of the Armenian martyrs on April 23.

Questions from the audience and a lively discussion followed about the genocide and Ignatius’ interest in learning all she could after a trip to Armenia with her father and her brother Adi in 2006, sponsored by NAASR.

She then read a chapter from her young adult manuscript The Devil’s Kaleidoscope, where 14-year-old Arakel awakens to camel bells tinkling like the rustling of leaves, as a camel caravan approaches in the desert. He hobbles over and asks the Arab caravan master to be taken along, Arakel’s only chance to escape the cave where he spent the night, alone, surrounded by bones and burnt fragments of clothing from Armenians who died there. “Arakel survives only because non-Armenians, people he thinks are his enemies, intervene to save him,” Ignatius said.

In writing her novel, she wanted to highlight the importance of individual acts of conscience in the face of evil. She said that if you go to genocide-watch.org, you will find active genocides going on in at least four countries right now and another 15 or so on a watch list, and stressed the importance of people doing whatever they can to stop the violence.

Ignatius is a lawyer and executive director of the Political Asylum Immigration Representation Project in Boston, which represents asylum-seekers who have fled from persecution throughout the world, and immigrants who are unjustly detained. She is also on the board and the Executive Committee of NAASR.

“I hope people learned a bit about Armenia tonight and I hope they left inspired to look into their own family history to uncover their own treasures.” She began her presentation about Armenia with a surprising photo of her very non-Armenian great-grand-mother, on her mother’s side, born in the US one year after the end of the Civil War, and descended from a Mayflower voyager.

“I’m only half-Armenian and like most people here tonight have a mixed family history, which has been deeply rewarding to learn all about,” she said.

Her project was funded in part by a grant from the Somerville Arts Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.