Djrbashian was born to an old Van family, established before the fourteenth century, long before the rise of the
Ottoman Empire, by a successful merchant who returned to his homeland from
Iran and bought a piece of land in the Aygestan (Armenian: Այգեստան, i.e. gardens) district of Van. The community water source was in his land, and his family got the obligation to make a fair distribution of the scarce water among the channels to Aygestan gardens for many centuries, according to quotas established by the community. This was the origin of the family name Jerbashkhian (Armenian: Ջրբաշխյան, i.e. water distributor). Mkhitar Djrbashian's father Mkrtich was one of the seven founders of the Van Guild of Merchants, which anticipated the possibility of Turkish military actions against the civilian population of their town and started collecting weapons for self-defense. In June 1915, he participated as a soldier in people's volunteer corps against the Turkish regular army sent to massacre all Armenian inhabitants and surrounding villages. Thanks to the offensive of the
Russian Army or, more exactly, its Armenian volunteer unit, the inhabitants of Van and some villagers of the
Vaspurakan Province were saved and then migrated with the Russian Army to the
Erivan Governorate of
Russian Empire. In the first years of the Soviet regime, Mkrtich Jerbashkhian continued importing European goods and selling them in the shops of his commercial company in Yerevan,
Tiflis, and
Baku. For this reason, he was deprived of voting rights in the
Soviet Union and his elder son Mkhitar was excluded from the last year of school. Mkrtich Jerbashkhian kept secret his fluency in French and German languages and his political views to avoid
NKVD repression. Other branches of the Jerbashkhian family also were forced to leave their fatherland. Some of them migrated to
Yerevan and Tiflis, others appeared as refugees in
Marseille. Mkhitar Djrbashian had two sisters: Sirvard (1904–1990) and Gohar (1921–2000), and a brother Eduard Jerbashkhian (1923–1999), a literary critic, full member of the
Armenian National Academy of Sciences (1982) and the director of its Institute of Literature from 1977 to 1999. The family name Jerbashkhian later was simplified to Jerbashian, and it appears as Dzhrbashjan or Djrbashian in many mathematical publications in accordance with the Russian spelling. ==Biography==