Like other descendants of exiles who have been denied a return to their homeland, Diasporic Armenians whose families escaped the genocide of 1915 have intense emotional attachments to a homeland that they have never seen. Burdened with narratives of trauma, and evoking deep antipathies, their homeland (now in eastern Turkey) may be, or feel to be, far too dangerous to body and spirit to visit. However, many have made “returns.” I accompanied over a dozen groups of these travelers whose geographic goals were very specific: the home-town or village from which their own parents or grandparents were exiled 75 to 100 years earlier. They especially hoped to find the actual family house, which they perceive as their homeland’s beating heart. Arriving as the first generation to “return home” after the genocide, these self-described pilgrims found themselves called upon to create ways to engage with it and, somehow, to make it their own. Many pilgrims responded by creating rituals that employ “survivor objects” to make their connection to the homeland personal and permanent. Pilgrims had already brought many of these objects along: property deeds, passports, insurance claims, items of clothing, and especially photographs of their own ancestors brought from the home-towns they search for. In this paper, I analyze three instances when individual pilgrims hid family photographs in places that stood for their lost family house, as it is rarely found. Thick ethnographic research allows me to reveal how the meaning of these seemingly similar acts can only be understood in the context of each pilgrim’s embedded history and memories, adding distinctive layers to homeland’s new meaning. For these photographs are far more than historical documents or discourse [dependent on their narrative value], rather, the histories embedded in them seem to compel their bodily deployment as performative objects such that they emerge as votives or ex-votives, able to give materiality to a generation’s ineffable or unrecognized spiritual needs. While providing agency for defining homeland as the pilgrims' own, these rituals also endow the homeland with a mosaic of new collective meanings, often restorative ones. Future work may show how these new meanings stand at a pivotal moment in the historicization of Armenian meanings of homeland, that is, at a moment between its many iterations as a lived experience and its future as a living memory.