Yeghiayan's mother, Aroussiag Terzian, had close relations with the Ethiopian royal family – her godmother was Menen Asfaw, the wife of Emperor Haile Selassie – and this relationship had afforded him and his two brothers the privilege to study abroad.
[3] He attended school at Indiana University for one year before being accepted to Berkeley, initially as a premed student, later changing his major and graduating with a Bachelor in history in 1959.
Yeghiayan was made responsible for the establishment and management in formulating policy, agency planning, conducting liaison with foreign and domestic governmental and private organizations and individuals, and encouragement of voluntary service programs within the United States and abroad.
In 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, he visited the newly formed Republic of Armenia and served as a legal advisor there and authored the first draft of the Armenian Constitution.
[4] A year after Yeghiayan's death; in November 2018, Mahdessian was absolved of embezzling funds, but found to have "committed acts of moral turpitude by both (1) misappropriating $30,000 from the nonprofit, and (2) engaging in tax fraud by falsely reporting this and another $26,000 in taxable payouts to her children and their law school as donations or loan repayments...
[7] Though as a youth Yeghiayan did not show too great an interest in the Armenian Genocide, the 1965 Yerevan demonstrations and the discovery of his father's harrowing experience through the massacres played a critical role in encouraging him to bring more public awareness to the subject.
In 1987, Yeghiayan came across a passage in the memoirs of Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, describing an exchange between him and Mehmed Talat Pasha, the man chiefly held responsible for the Armenian Genocide.
[15] In 2015, Yeghiayan donated over 40 boxes of documents from the New York Life Insurance Company class action lawsuit to the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
[15] Yeghiayan also filed additional suits against other insurance companies, including AXA (with co-counsel Brian Kabateck and Mark Geragos), which agreed to settle in 2005 by paying $17.5 million, and Deutsche Bank.