“I’m Armenian, Swedish, German, and one part we don’t know because of lost history. In every direction I look, I find questions that I seek answers to about my ancestry. Where did I come from? What did they go through? How did they all get to this point here for me to be an American born in 1978 in California?” tells Heather Martin to The Huffington Post.

“Psychologists talk about inter-generational trauma - trauma that is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors. In our DNA we are carrying the struggles, fears, journeys and unresolved suffering from our ancestors. We think of ourselves as an independent and individual mass of cells wandering through life, trying to figure out our own internal strife and path, but this is only part of the story. Imagine that part of your journey is intertwined with your mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandfather, grandmother, great grandfather, etc,” writes The Huffington Post.

Circa 2008, she was inspired by a brilliant idea related to her Great Grandfather, Melkon Jenanyan. She decided to write her first book. The title of the book is Reclaiming Konia: A Tale of Love, Loss and the Armenian Genocide. “What made the journey to write the book even more challenging, was that my great grandfather - Melkon Jenanyan - a Christian, Armenian preacher and missionary who heeded to warning to leave the Ottoman Empire in 1909 because the ‘violence would only get worse,’ never spoke anything else of the massacres once they set foot on U.S. soil. His mentality and philosophy was to look forward, not backward, so his children were never taught the Armenian and Turkish language he spoke and preached in so frequently,” tells Heather Martin.

April 24, 2016 marks the 101st anniversary since the massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. It was a horrendous crime that both Turkey and U.S. leadership have refused to acknowledge as Genocide.

“I will both fight and pray for recognition of this crime against Armenians. But I know that this book - a call from my Great Grandfather, Melkon - allowed him to express his own desire for justice, to speak about the Genocide in a way he never could while he was alive. And in the process, I have realized my own personal destiny, intertwined with his and my Armenian ancestry, finding a way to heal even in the face of the gravest injustice,” she concludes.