Home > Biographical details  > Descendants of Zohrab's Son, Basil > The Zorab Branch > Judge Edgar Albert (Eddie) Zorab -- robed

Renee Milders has kindly given this information about the judge:

"My memories of the Zorabs are only from my childhood and younger years (1960-1985-ish). From what I heard from my parents, Mr. Zorab was considered one of the brainiest in the Dutch judicial system at the time. If I remember well, he came to England with his parents and went to Oxford. He met Helen in England and I believe she was of Armenian descent as well.

They both had slight accents when they spoke Dutch. Eddie was a short man, often wearing a bowtie, a little 'bookish' in behavior, as if he was contemplating court cases, definitely not cricket scores or anything trivial. My parents would say they had to stop him in the street for him to look up and notice them! Helen was a petite, very elegant woman. They both loved the theater. I do remember they had a younger cousin (or a nephew) who also lived in The Hague. His name is Armen Joseph, but he may very well be from Helen's 'side'. "

Judge Edgar Zorab, was a judge of the Java High Court (according to Anne Basil's book , page 159 ) in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).  He must have been interned by the Japanese in World War II, because in 1945 he arrived in Australia and must have later moved to Holland, and was a judge there, as well. 

He visited Persia and Armenia collecting family history information, some of which was taken from letters and books, and some from pastoral letters written in AD 1780 by the Catholicos Lucas and in AD 1831 by the Catholicos Ephraim of the Armenian Church, and from "notations" written by Avetik Zorabian of New Julfa in 1919, in which further confirmation is given by the edicts of Shah Safavi, Shah Solaiman, Shah Abbas II, and Nadir Shah.

He drew up the second Roman alphabet version of a Zohrab/Zorab family tree on the basis of the genealogical tree composed in Armenian by Aviet (Avetick) Carapiet Zohrabiants, of New Julfa, Isfahan, Iran, in 1919. Judge Edgar's tree was spread over five (5) pages of a notebook. I have received a version of this by email from Dr. John Zorab, and then a photocopy by mail from Mr. Kelvin Pollock. The two versions which I have received are clearly not photocopies of each other or of the same original, and the latter seems more authentic, in that it shows lines appearing to be those of a notebook, and in that it includes writing in Dutch, which was clearly Judge Edgar Zorab's main language (apart from Armenian, if he knew that, which he probably did).