| Name |
Asa Kent Jennings [1] |
| Nickname |
Admiral |
| Born |
20 Sep 1877 |
Ontario, Wayne, New York  [1, 4, 5, 6] |
- Jennings had grown up in a religious family on a farm in Upstate New York on the south shore of Lake Ontario. [2]
- Jennings had grown up with the rhythms of family, farm, and church, and while the fruits and vegetables of Asia Minor ... were exotic, the texture of life was not so different from the Finger Lakes country. He had spent his boyhood picking raspberries and taking cartons of them by wagon to sell in the nearby boomtown of Rochester. [3]
|
| Gender |
Male |
| Education |
Before 1899 |
Syracuse University, Syracuse, Onondaga, New York [2, 6] |
- Jennings was forced to leave school due to a lack of financing. [2]
|
| Graduation |
1899 |
Webster Union Free School, Webster, Monroe, New York [7] |
| Occupation |
1901 |
YMCA, Utica, Oneida, New York [2, 8] |
| Membership Secretary |
| Occupation |
After 1901 |
YMCA, Carthage, Jefferon, New York [2, 8] |
| General Secretary |
| Health |
1904 |
Utica, Oneida, New York [5] |
| Diagnosed with Potts Disease. |
- Jennings, then twenty-seven years old, contracted typhoid fever, recovered, then relapsed, and in poor health returned to Utica. [2]
- Asa was first diagnosed with acute tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs. He worsened in the hospital over an eight week stay, but Asa felt he needed "fresh air" and left the hospital for a lodge on Seventh Lake in the Adirondacks.
Failing to improve, his wife brought him to another doctor where the additional diagnosis of Pott's disease (a tubercular infection that travels from the lungs to the spine). He returned to Seventh Lake for a short while before Asa was forced into an emergency surgery.
Although the doctors had felt he would die soon, Asa left the hospital for Clifton Spring, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Here, the combination of massage, rest and the sulfer-springs, led to his eventual healing, although the damage to his body would last throughout the remainder of his life. [9]
|
| Religion |
Between 1905 - 1908 [5] |
| Ordained a Methodist Minister |
- Asa Kent became an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1908 and held pastorates at Forestport (1907-1908), Barneveld (1909), Richfield Springs (1911-1915) and Chateaugay (1916-1917). [10]
|
| Occupation |
1911 |
YMCA, Utica, Oneida, New York [2] |
- ... Jennings was moving from one white wood-framed church to the next, never quite making a living, and in 1911 he returned to the steady pay of the YMCA in Utica. [2]
|
| Residence |
1918 |
Cleveland, Oswego, New York [4] |
| Occupation |
1918 |
YMCA, Utica, Oneida, New York [3] |
| Army Chaplain |
- Early in 1918, while he was working for the YMCA in upstate New York ... [Jennings] took a job as a YMCA Army chaplain, and he traveled, without his family, to bases in Virginia and New Jersey where he ministered to soldiers departing for the war in Europe. [11]
|
| Occupation |
1917 - 1918 |
Cleveland, Oswego, New York [4, 5] |
| Methodist Minister |
- He had served as the traveling pastor at Methodist churches in the small farm hamlets of Barneveld, Cleveland, Trenton, Forestport, Panama and Chateauguay. [2]
|
| Occupation |
1918 |
Le Mans, Loire, France [4, 7, 8, 13] |
| YMCA Volunteer with Red Cross Relief Efforts |
- A year later, with the war ended and Amy and the children still back in her hometown of Cleveland, Jennings had asked the YMCA to send him to France, and off he went with a group of forty-eight other YMCA men across the Atlantic. [11]
- World War One erupted and drew the United States into the frey. To do his part, Asa joined the Red Cross and served in France until the close of the war. His experiences with the Red Cross eventually led him to a position with the YMCA. [7]
- "[Jennings] work in the previous few years had been to provide Bible study and hot coffee to decommissioning American and Allied soldiers in Europe." [12]
|
| Occupation |
1919 - 1921 |
Czechoslovakia [8, 13] |
| YMCA, Regional Secretary |
- [Jennings] traveled by train across middle Europe to Czechoslovakia, where he continued to minister to demobilizing soldiers with the Y's mix of books, Bible passages, hot coffee, films and sports including the new game of basketball. [11]
- ... managing a YMCA hut for decommissioning Czech soldiers and starting an athletic program for boys. [2]
|
| Occupation |
Aug 1922 |
Smyrna, Turkey [2, 5, 8, 14, 15] |
| YMCA, Boys Work Secretary |
- Jenning's assignment in Smyrna would be to engage boys of different faiths and ethnicities - Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and Jews - in sports and healthy outdoor activities to teach tolerance, responsibility, and Christian virtue. [2]
- Asa gained the respect of both the Greek and Turkish governments so after completing his time at sea both governments used Asa to help negotiate prisoner exchanges between the two countries. [7]
|
| Awards and Recognitions |
27 Dec 1922 |
Athens, Greece [16] |
| Golden Cross of Saint Xavier |
| Awards and Recognitions |
27 Dec 1922 |
Athens, Greece [16] |
| Medal of Military Merit |
- The Greek Government has awarded its highest civilian honor, the Golden Cross of Saint Xavier and the highest war honor, the Medal of Military Merit, to Asa K. Jennings of Utica, N.Y., for his work with the Near East Relief in directing the evacuation of 500,000 refugees from Asia Minor.
This was the first time in history that both medals were awarded to the same person simultaneously. [16]
|
| Military |
Sep 1922 - July 1923 |
Smyrna, Turkey [8] |
| Smyrna Fire & Coastal Evacuations |
- It was in Turkey that Jennings performed the seemingly impossible, heroic act of saving nearly 350,000 refugees. When he arrived, Turkey was fighting a brutal war with Greece for possession of the territory around Smyrna in Asia Minor. As a result of the fighting, large portions of the city were burned to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. With no authority beyond his convictions, Jennings was able to negotiate and secure safe passage from the Turkish armies for a fleet of Greek merchant vessels. [8]
- After the immediate evacuation of Smyrna, Jennings went on to work with the United States, Greece and Turkey to evacuate others along the coast to safety.
"The evacuation of Smyrna was only the begging of a more massive exodus that would ultimately involve more than a million people." [17]
- [Asa] played an active role in the implementation of the Greco-Turkish Agreement on the Restitution of Interned Civilians and the Exchange of Prisoners of War, singed in Lausanne on January 30, 1923. [18]
|
| Occupation |
1924 - 1928 |
Smyrna, Turkey [19] |
| Smyrna Welfare Council Project |
- Between 1924 and January of 1928, Asa K. Jennings made several trips back and forth between the United States and Turkey drumming up support for various Turkish youth projects. At some point, his son, Asa W. Jennings, joined him in his work on the Smyrna Welfare Council project until was discontinued in June of 1928. The Jennings family returned to the United States in July of that same year. This marked the end of the YMCA's involvement with Jennings and his projects overseas. [19]
|
| Awards and Recognitions |
1929 |
Smyrna, Turkey [7] |
| Co-Founder, The Friends of Turkey |
- Asa stayed in Turkey following the conflict and helped to establish an organization similar to the YMCA (without the "C"), called "The Friends of Turkey". [7]
|
| Died |
1933 [1] |
- In 1933, on a visit to Washington to confer with Turkish authorities and after having spent the night as a guest of the Bristols, Jennings was stricken while walking near the White House and died on the way to the hospital. His weak heart had finally stopped working." [20]
|
| Buried |
1933 |
Cleveland Village Cemetery, North Street, Cleveland, Oswego, New York [1] |
 |
20081013 - Headstone of Asa K. Jennings
Photo by Kiely Malone |
 |
20081013 - Headstone: Jennings Family
Photo by Kiely Malone |
| Person ID |
I1407 |
CHS Genealogy |
| Last Modified |
24 Aug 2015 |
1877 - 1933
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