The ledger of who sent money home is in Raleigh

In 1915 an American consulate in Beirut wrote down who was sending money to Lebanon and who was receiving it. A century later the pages are searchable, because a Lebanese couple in North Carolina paid for a place to keep them.

Much of the early record of the Lebanese abroad was written by somebody else: a consulate, a census taker, a port clerk. It was written for their own reasons, and it sits in their archives.

This is a piece about people who went to those archives, brought the pages home to a searchable form, and what they found. It starts with one ledger.

The Khayrallah Center at North Carolina State University, which holds it, says that during the First World War the United States Consulate in Beirut handled money sent home by immigrants in America to their relatives. The center has built a database from those pages. It lists the names of people who sent and received money through the consulate in 1915 and 1916, and where they lived. There is an interactive map that lets you search by village.

Not a story about a village. A list of names, from the time, saying where each person lived.

The pages come from what the university library calls the Beirut Consulate Post Records Collection, covering 1859 to 1939. According to its finding aid it is twenty four record books, and the bulk of it falls in 1915 and 1916. The material is mainly about the wartime period and about remittances, the money immigrants in the United States sent to relatives in Lebanon. It is primarily in English, with some Arabic and French.

The originals are at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland. The Khayrallah Center digitised them in 2016, and the finding aid puts the digital collection at 29,778 files. One of the record books, listed on the center’s digital archive, is described in a single line: a miscellaneous record book spanning 1915 to 1916, containing master remittance lists.

The center explains why the money matters. Remittances, it says, were the largest source of income for Mount Lebanon in the early 1900s. That is the center’s own statement, and we have not tested it against a second source, so we are passing it on as theirs. What the pages show is smaller and easier to hold: who, to whom, from where.

The consulate itself did not last. The center notes that it closed in 1917, when the United States entered the war on the opposite side from the Ottoman Empire. The remittance database covers only 1915 and 1916.

The remittance book is one of six databases on the center’s site, and the others read like the same instinct applied to different people.

A 1908 Syrian American Business Directory, 256 pages, was a voluntary register of business owners. The center says it has over 3,300 entries and records the owner, the type of business, the address, and the town or village the owner came from in the Middle East. The center’s page does not say who compiled it.

A second directory dates from 1907. Al-Safar al-Mufid, Dr. Abdou’s Travels, runs to 676 pages and, according to the center, holds 7,337 entries of Arab businesses and their owners across the world. The searchable site that carries it says close to 7,400 records, and that only about thirty per cent of them name a country of origin. The two numbers are close, and we give both.

Three Argentine directories, published in 1917, 1927 to 1928 and 1942, list the names, addresses and occupations of Syrian and Lebanese business owners there. The center is careful about what they are. They are a selective, self reporting sample, it says, not a census of the community.

And there is the census itself. The databases page says the center holds more than three hundred thousand records of Lebanese immigrants from the United States census, for the years 1900 to 1940. The Nassour Archive page, on the same site, lists the US census as 1880 to 1950. We do not know which range the searchable records cover, so we are using the narrower one.

Then the newspapers, which may matter most to anyone who reads Arabic.

The center has put Arabic language newspapers from the United States, Argentina and Brazil online in a searchable database. The American titles were published between 1894 and 1960. The site is arabicsearch.org.

The difficulty was always the script. Scanned Arabic does not search well. The center’s newspaper page says its beta system could read Arabic from page images with an accuracy between 75 and 93 per cent, and that it built a way to map the recognised text back onto the PDF so the file could be searched in Arabic. That is a figure from the beta stage, not a current one.

The page counts move depending on where you look. The 2020 announcement said seventeen newspapers and nearly three hundred thousand pages. The center’s current newspaper page says thirty nine collections and nearly three hundred thousand pages. A November 2021 news item from the university says 250,000 pages, with about eight per cent uploaded to the searchable database and more than a thousand users from the Middle East and the United States. All of them say the aim was over a million pages within three years. We have not found a current total.

The work was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. NC State’s own news item says the grant was $476,483, and calls it the largest NEH grant to the university to date.

The center was not founded by a government or a ministry. On 14 October 2014 the chancellor of NC State announced an $8.1 million gift from Moise and Vera Khayrallah to the university’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Moise Khayrallah is a biotechnology entrepreneur who founded three drug development companies. Vera Khayrallah is a licensed social worker. They emigrated from Lebanon to North Carolina in 1983 to attend graduate school. The center’s own history page says it began as a 2010 pilot project, funded by Moise Khayrallah, to research Lebanese history in North Carolina. That project produced a documentary and a museum exhibit before it grew into the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.

The university described the gift as the largest single gift in the history of its college and its first privately endowed center. It said the Lebanese community in North Carolina numbers about 16,000 people today. Moise Khayrallah, in the announcement, explained the reason in plain terms: he wanted to show how one community had established itself in the state and then contributed to its commerce, education and success.

Akram Khater, a professor of history at NC State, directs the center and holds the Khayrallah Chair.

At the announcement, the chancellor called it the world’s first center on Lebanese culture and history outside Lebanon. That is his description and the university’s. We have not surveyed the world’s universities, so we are not repeating it as ours.

We are also not telling you how many people the archive covers. The databases hold hundreds of thousands of records, but the sources themselves say they are voluntary registers, self reported samples and partly read scans. Who is in them depends on who answered, who registered, and whose name the machine could read. A name missing from a database is not evidence that a person was not there.

If your family left from a village in Mount Lebanon during the first half of the twentieth century, the practical advice is short.

Start at the databases page on the Khayrallah Center site and search your surname and your village in the remittances database and the two business directories. Then try arabicsearch.org with the name in Arabic script, since the newspapers are searchable in Arabic. The Nassour Archive holds photographs, letters, diaries, family papers, business records and oral histories, and researchers can use a research request form to ask for access. The rights notice on the one consulate record book we opened says the donor retains copyright, and that use is permitted for non commercial research, scholarly and educational purposes, with attribution. Check the notice on any volume you use.

The earlier Lubnan pieces keep reaching the same conclusion: the record of the diaspora was written by other people, in other languages, for other purposes, and it was left to us to find it.

Here is a case of the other thing happening. A couple who left Lebanon for graduate school in 1983, one of whom went on to found drug companies, and who then paid for the pages to be digitised and put in front of anybody who asks. Not a monument. A search box.

That is a way of staying connected to a place that does not depend on being there. A professional abroad can do it with a gift, or with an hour, or with a box of letters from a grandmother’s drawer.

So it goes on the record. With the dates, the disagreements and the names of the people who kept the pages.