Claire Taschdjian was born as Claire Hirschberg in Berlin, Germany. In 1934 the family moved to China and in 1938 the family settled in Peking, where Claire worked as a secretary to Franz Weidenreich, a German anthropologist and the director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory, which was closely involved in the Peking Man excavation. In 1944, she married Edgar Taschdjian, an Austrian-born Armenian and in 1948 they moved to Chicago, Illinois.