Find your family roots

Why some of the family names of immigrants changed?

Families have roots and names have rules. Baabdat, the beautiful village of Maten, formed families that were known as the Baabdati families. Nevertheless, the change in some of them because of the distance added and removed some letters from the names which unfortunately made some of the immigrant families lose their real name…

How did that exactly happen? What lies behind it?
Two major factors made this change in the identity of the family names:

• The wrong or vague translation is one of the main reasons. The Baabdati expatriates to immigration countries made a mistake in spelling or writing their names because they didn’t speak the foreign language. Thus, the names were written as they were pronounced in each country or any language according to the surname, profession or local names… That’s what made the local authorities and harbor management register the name of these immigrants in a different random way.
• Another factor that led to this problem was to keep the name known in Baabdat in the foreign countries according to the tribe, grandfather, father or nickname… For example, the Corbani family was known in Argentina as the Flores family, the Melki family as Martinez and the Lahoud Labaki family as Dominguez and the Iskandar Fadoul Labaki family as Fadul. The family of Nassif Mansour Labaki in Brazil became Mansur and the family of Mansour Najem Labaki became Najim. Spelling modifications were also made in the way the names and families were written differently such as: Melki, Mulqui, Melqui... and Labaque, Labaqui, Lavaque, Labaki, Lavaki, Labaké…

This fact doesn’t mean that whoever adopted these family names or other ones is necessarily from Baabdat. There are a lot of families who have origins in other areas of Lebanon and Syria.

All these changes in the writing, pronunciation and adoption of new names, made the search for the Baabdati family roots, the places of the immigrants in the diaspora and the people who originate from Baabdat, difficult and confusing, especially that some of them were pronounced and written like foreign family names already existing in the immigration countries. It’s normal that all these causes and results affected the accuracy of the statistics regarding Baabdati expatriates.

What is the solution?

Cooperation is a necessity within the Baabdatis first, to complete the reunion of the beloved village people. Thus, the new generations will meet, and families will open up to each other and hear their mutual joys and sorrows…

To go back to the roots, it is now possible to the people who originate from Baabdat and want to find their origins and the main family they belong to, in their mother hometown of Baabdat, to get the origin of the family through the “Family Roots” section, inside their personal file.
In case nothing is mentioned in that section, it means that the family they currently belong to, is the family of their main roots.