He was the eldest son of Sarkis and Vartouhi Basmajian of Arapkir, Turkey in the Ottoman Empire. A family tree says he was born in 1870 but it is not further confirmed and perhaps was a bit younger, as there is a large gap between his birth and his next known sibling's. Not much is known about his life. His parents died a week apart of typhoid in 1892. His brother Haroutune was over 10 years younger than him and looked up to him. Once young Haroutune was badly disciplined at school and locked in the building by his teacher. When Dikran learned of this he found Haroutune's teacher and beat him up. In the fall of 1895 (believed to be the first week of November in the Gregorian Calendar) Arapkir was ravaged by the Hamidian Massacres and over a thousand Armenian residents of the town were killed. Dikran was found shot behind the family home, which had been set on fire like many other Armenian homes. He was said to have been at the hands of his good Turkish friend, as the Turkish population of the town was incited to turn against the Armenians. In the home's cellar among harvested grain was kept a hope chest with a suit Dikran's mother had sewn for him before her death to wear at his wedding one day, but that day would never come. Though the fire burned the grain around it, the chest and suit did not burn, which was seen as miraculous. Some grain did survive in the cellar as well and it was shared with their Armenian neighbors in the difficult days that followed the massacre and mass destruction of Armenian homes and buildings. Dikran's body would have presumably been buried in an Armenian Orthodox cemetery in Arapkir, but it is not known if there was more than one at this time. The widespread number of deaths during a short period of time when he was killed adds to the uncertainty of what was done with his body. There is one Armenian Orthodox cemetery which still remains in Arapkir to this day but I do not know when it was founded or if Dikran was buried there. Very few grave markers appear to remain and so his grave, where it is in Arapkir, is almost certainly unmarked now.