House without Elders

"A house without an elderly person is like an orchard without a well."

Arabic proverb

Without an oral tradition, how will we know who we are and where we came from. I let my best chance at building such a history slip away by not being curious enough when my father was alive and before Alzheimer’s assaulted him. In fact, I didn’t get the longing to establish a heritage, to learn about the Handal family line until just a few years ago after more than 50 years of my life had passed.

My start to this journey seemed hopeless. I was armed with so little. I am one of five children – sons and daughters of Frank, grandsons and granddaughters of Nicholas, great grandsons and great granddaughters of Solomon. That’s it, I could go back three generations from us and not even completely.

I did know the two children of my Grandfather Nicholas. They were Frank my father, and Eddie my uncle. It gets very thin beyond that. Nicholas was married to Emilia who was a Handal before marriage from a branch in Honduras. I knew Emilia (called by we children, Nanny) had at least two sisters, Lydia and Anita. Finally, I was reasonably sure that Nicholas had brothers named George and Joe and a sister Mary. Also, I had been told that the Handal family is a large family and that Nicholas immigrated from Bethlehem. I take no small amount of pride at the thought of being part of a family from Bethlehem.

When I started I used Ancestry.com to perform my research and develop a Handal family tree. The first layer was easy enough to fill. I know the birthdays, spouses, and children of myself and my siblings, and I know the names of my first cousins (Eddie’s kids), but no dates etc. The lack of information on Brian, Paul, and Jeanie is due to a rift in the family that occurred around the time my Uncle Eddie was taken far too early by cancer. I do not know the specifics. I do not know our perspectives or theirs. Further, I have no interest in knowing. They were issues of a different generation that were not my issues. I am just happy that after I started the family tree in a fit of coincidence, my Cousin Brian reached out to me on Facebook.

Facebook. Social Media. I have been such an idiot. I would think of my cousins from time to time over the years, but I didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. I knew that eventually my Aunt Joan (their mom) had re-married, but I did not know where she moved to. Time passed, the computer rose to prominence and social media was born. In that revolution of technology I had reconnected with old friends of my youth, but I never thought to look for the cousins time had misplaced. God bless you Cousin Brian.

I came back to my family tree (more a small bush than anything) after Father’s Day this year when my wonderful wife surprised me with a gift which will be giving for a long time – the Ancestry.com DNA kit. I was so excited when she gave it to me. I looked it up online, I researched it, I memorized the instructions (all of 4 steps), performed the test, and sent it in!

While waiting for results, I was able to refine my research techniques and filled in Nicholas’s generation though was still woefully short on Nanny’s. I found an image of the 1930’s census that had Solomon and his brood all living together in Brooklyn. So Solomon had immigrated as well. I found out the name of Solomon’s wife (or at least his second wife), and all the siblings of Nicholas along with a couple of daughters-in-law to Solomon (one of which was Nanny). I was getting excited, so I continued to dig. I found a sobering image of my Nanny’s gravestone. I located a passport application and picture for Solomon. I located the death date of most of Nicholas’s generation as well as associated locations.

While I was waiting, I did not want to lose momentum. So I worked on the Bell side of the family and started a family tree springing from Mom. I did the same thing with the Stovall family which is Jean-Marie’s enjoyable and loving clan. Finally, in less than a month’s time my DNA results arrived.

Thankfully they were as expected. I didn’t have to change out a desert heritage for lederhosen or give up my search into the annuls of Bethlehem for the cold climes of Siberia. When I gave permission to Ancestry.com to match my results to the results of others, I was given further proof of its reliability as one of my first cousins on Mom’s side of the family turned up as a top relation. Thank goodness, Jeb, we are related both by what we have been told and science!

It is fascinating to review and study the link of potential relatives. The list starts at first cousins and moves along rating the chances of a match as excellent, good, fair, and poor. One such excellent match was an unknown fourth cousin, Claudia. She had an amazingly full family tree rife with Handals. I did not see in it then a direct link to my branch (I knew too little) but reached out to her to ask if she could give me advice on how to find my own way.

Claudia lives in the U.S. but was born in Hondurus (Tegucigalpa I believe). I have enjoyed getting to know her and commune with a fellow Handal. She did me the favor of introducing me to her cousin Jorge who she described as the “Family Historian.” He lives in Tegucigalpa and has graciously and selflessly helped me. He inquired about what I knew of the Honduran Handals in my lineage. I told him of my grandmother, of her being from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and the names of her sisters. The name Lydia Handal was one he knew. There was a famous Honduran composer named Lydia Handal who was a national treasure. I didn’t know anything about this, though my father did have an album of my Great Aunt Lydia’s entitled “From Lydia with Love,” but I didn’t know of any other music.

Jorge then referred me to Guillermo (another cousin) who lived closer to San Pedro Sula. Guillermo helped me look into Lydia as he also filled me in on some generalities with the Handal family in Honduras – the largest of the Arab families in Honduras Guillermo said. But I had too little information on Lydia for him to be sure that our Lydia Handal was THE Lydia Handal.

Meanwhile, Jorge sent me an invitation to the “Handal Family Worldwide” Facebook group. My family has a Facebook group. Wow. On there, I introduced myself and in turn have met several other Handals who I have spoken with and found to be charming and wonderful. One of them, Myriam, stunned me with the question, “Is your father Frank, the same Frank Handal that took me and my daughters sailing in Charleston.” We talked back and forth on it, Charleston threw me as Dad did not do much sailing there. He mostly sailed on Lake Murry outside of Columbia, SC. Then I had a “Doh!” moment and sent her a picture of my dad and asked if that Frank were her Frank. It was (and that made me smile). Myriam turned out to be a first cousin of Dad’s, and thus my second cousin. I was a bit floored. Myriam is a daughter of a brother of Nanny’s. She was born in San Pedro Sula though lives in the U.S. now. She then confirmed that her Aunt Lydia, my Great Aunt Lydia, was THE Lydia Handal of national treasure fame, and that performance of her songs can be found on YouTube. Amazing.

Then another relative of some flavor, Joe, contacted me through Handal Family Worldwide and linked me to a document that connected me back to Nassar Handal in Bethlehem who was born in the mid 1600's. It was an incredibly emotional moment when I found our family within this document, and our lineage going back unbroken to the seventeenth century. My head is still spinning. Such a generous act to bring us into the fold. Prior to this when I would see the name Handal my faith in relationship was based solely on spelling, but now there is a feeling that reaches into my gene memory that I have never experienced before.

The joy of being back with my first cousins, the loving act of a simple gift from my wife, and walls tumbled. I am expanding family. I am not only gathering together something to pass along to my children and grandchildren, but something that can be shared with my siblings and my cousins Brian, Paul, and Jeanie. There are times that a task seems daunting and incredibly large, and then something magical occurs and the world itself shrinks to such a small thing I don’t know why I was ever intimidated by it. Now I can bring an elder into the house, and hopefully soon I will be able to say more than just that the Handal family is large and comes from Bethlehem.