Ruth Azneve Parmelee (3 April 1885 – 15 December 1973) was a Christian missionary and a witness to the Armenian genocide.

Ruth A. Parmelee was born in Trabzon, Trebizond Vilayet, Ottoman Empire, on 3 April 1885, to parents who served as missionaries in the region.

[3] In 1914 she went to Kharpert (today Harput) to serve as a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

[4] Having lost its Christian-majority Balkan possessions in the Balkan Wars, fears had intensified within the ranks of the Ottoman government that a similar push for independence by the Armenians—Turkey's largest remaining Christian minority, situated in the heart of Anatolia—might lead to the breakup of Turkey itself.

Following the outbreak of World War I, mutual distrust between Turks and Armenians reached almost intolerable levels when, in early 1915, Turkey was invaded both by the British at Gallipoli and Russia from the east.

One procedure which was used to torture Professor Lulejian was to throw him into a fearfully ill-smelling Turkish closet, after having beaten him unconscious.

[3] Parmelee described the conditions of the deportees: It is too harrowing to try to describe the outrages committed day by day for weeks, on these thousands of deportees along the road, then for most of them to be killed outright-perhaps by drowning in a river or to drop dead from hunger, thirst, and fatigue.

Parmelee describes things like Armenian Christmas on January 19, 1916, and other cultural encounters: Mother & I attended the women's association of Central Church lunch and missionary meeting.

She then returned to the Ottoman Empire to help out in the relief efforts of the refugees for the American Women's Hospitals Service (AWH).

[10][11] In 1922 she went to Greece where she helped found the AWH hospital in Salonika for the care of Greek refugees of the Greco-Turkish War.