NEWINGTON - Art Shahverdian never asked his parents about what it was like to flee the then-Ottoman Empire while anywhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were being massacred by the Turkish government in 1915.

       â€�"We really didn’t understand it,” Shahverdian says. â€�"As a young person you don’t understand the impact that this had on our families.”

       As it turns out, it’s the reason that Shahverdian lives in Newington today. Assembling the roadmap--which runs from Iran to Mexico and through the U.S. immigration system of 1924 quota windows--back into his family’s troubled past was a challenge he embraced when a friend and teacher at Avon High School asked for a family’s story for a course on Holocaust and genocide throughout history.

       And he was on his own for the most part.

       â€�"There was no oral history, no written history [of the family],” Shahverdian says. â€�"It was all pieced together.”

       The Internet helps, namely Ancestry.com, he says. The result of that search was a Newington Public Library presentation that includes everything from newspaper clippings--New York Times coverage and editorials condemning the genocide being carried out by the Turkish government--emigration application character references and photographs of Armenian prisoners along the infamous â€�"death marches” to the deserts of Syria.

       Standing before the audience at My Armenian Experience, an event held in commemoration of the genocide’s 100th anniversary, Shahverdian points to a black and white, grainy photo.

       â€�"These are the death marches,” he tells the group. â€�"This is real, folks.”

       For his father, Ashod, it was as real as it can get. He was 12 when Turkish paramilitary personnel came to his home town of Khoy.

       â€�"They just came through the village, killing,” Shahverdian says. â€�"He actually witnessed the killings.”

       Ashod hid in a hand-dug well, waiting out the massacre. When he could finally emerge, his family members were nowhere to be found. It’s said that he traveled with a group of Kurdish nomads for several years before he met up with them again.

       He would come to the United States on the S.S. Byron, a ship that Shahverdian proudly displays in a photograph he uncovered over the course of his research. In 1924, immigration quota legislation narrowed the window for many groups looking to enter the U.S.

       When Shahverdian’s mother, Rose, was taking her journey to the U.S., one that would land her south of the border for a stint before she could enter California from Mexico, only 124 Armenians were being admitted to the country per year. One misstep in the immigration process and you could land at the back of the waiting list, Shahverdian says.

       On that list, that meant a 14-year wait, he says.

       â€�"That’s what quota laws were doing,” Shahverdian says. â€�"What they really wanted to do was exclude anyone who wasn’t from Northern Europe.”

       But they got through. Shahverdian says his grandfather bribed an immigration official in California to get Rose into the country. Meanwhile, Ashod was starting his new life in New Britain as an employee with the Corbin Screw Company. Against all odds--they had beaten longer ones--the two would meet when Rose found her way in Connecticut and the rest, as they say, is history.