[3] Frederick Gaylord Coan was born on 23 May 1859 in Urumia, Persia (presently the capital of West Azerbaijan Province, Iran).

He also met his future wife, Ida Jane Speer, a Presbyterian minister's daughter, whom Coan married in 1885 before returning to the Ottoman Empire.

[4] Upon graduating from Wooster University in 1882, his mother convinced him to give up his musical dreams and instead continue his studies in order to become a missionary and return to the Ottoman Empire.

[4] Armenian Christians had been an oppressed (and restive) minority in the Ottoman Empire, often turning to Eastern Orthodox Russia as well as Western Protestant missionaries for protection.

Moreover, an Armenian nationalist movement which led riots in Constantinople and several Eastern provinces had been brutally suppressed in the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1896.

Ottoman military officers including Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had seized power from Sultan Abdülhamid II and attempted to establish a constitutional monarchy in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

At least half a million Muslim Ottomans from the Empire's former Balkan possessions sought refuge in Turkey,[7] some seeking revenge against Christians.

[9][10] As World War I began in July 1914, the Ottoman Empire's Eastern provinces, with their significant Armenian population, became strategically important, both because Russia continued to seek a warm water port and protect its southern border, and as it continued protecting fellow Christians.

[10] When the Kurdish and Turkish troops advanced into the Eastern Ottoman provinces in January 1915, an estimated 20,000 Armenians and other Christians sought protection in the Urumia plain.

The Turkish soldiers, in many cases offered by Germans, drove the Armenians across the plains, perpetrating upon them brutalities that were enough to break anyone's heart.

I found one day a great mass of human bones, thirty feet high, and I said to my Turkish guide: "How do you account for this?"

When those girls reached the middle of the bridge crossing this wild stream, one maiden threw up her arm as a signal and the entire 1,600 dashed themselves into the roaring torrent."

The guide replied, "After we had killed off 30,000 in this district we came to this church and to our surprise found it filled with men, women and children who had sought refuge there, thinking that they might not be discovered.