In 1896 Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid issued a decree that allowed Ottoman Armenians, and only Armenians, to emigrate on the condition that they forfeit their Ottoman nationality and never return. A key step in this legal process – terk-i tabiiyet - was sitting for a photograph. While these photographs look like family portraits and were often produced by professional Armenian studio photographers, they are binding legal documents of exclusion. Guided by the actual faces captured in these portraits, this paper draws attention to children’s experiences of migration. Focusing on terk-i tabiiyet and the specific lives shaped through this process allows us to shift the typical emphasis on adult male-dominated histories of labor migration. Women and children feature prominently in the bureaucratic photographs taken before their departure. Between 1896 and 1908 at least 4300 individuals left the empire via terk-i tabiiyet and roughly a third of them were minor children. “Minor children” – the category in which they are discussed by both Ottoman and US officials – are not at all a minor detail in the photographs and demand careful attention. This article focuses on a particular case to foreground the lived experience of migration and also address how approaches to the migration of children provided each state a means by which to show the state to be a caring and benevolent state.