Family Ancestry,Norm Solomon investigates his Syrian heritage firsthand

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Dec 10 2009

Family Ancestry

Norm Solomon investigates his Syrian heritage firsthand

Norm Solomon shown at Barshin Spring in Syria.

For Norm Solomon, even the theft of his wallet and subsequent loss of thousands of dollars in cash and credit card charges couldn’t put a dent in his good spirits.

After all, he had just begun to unravel a lifelong mystery, that of his family ancestry. And for the historian and economics professor from Wilsonville, on his way back to the United States from a recent trip to Syria, birthplace of his father, that was worth far more than dollars and euros.

“This was a trip we saved a lot of money for,” Solomon said last week as he arrived at the Wilsonville Family History Center on Town Center Loop East. “And we had some money left over, and now we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Consider it the price of doing business.

“I think it might have actually been the guy who helped us with our luggage,” Solomon said with a wry chuckle, shaking his head ruefully.

He’s not the type of guy to look back in these types of situations, however. He just charges on to the next task at hand, in this case his takeover as head of the Family History Center from outgoing director Laurane Clark.

Clark and her husband headed to Singapore in July on a three-year mission, leaving Solomon to fill her shoes running the center located at Wilsonville’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“I haven’t seen him since March,” said Clarke prior to her departure. “The Family History Center has been here 10 to 15 years, and I’m the only director we’ve ever had.”

Solomon is a fitting replacement, in part because of his own interests, and also because of the strong interest in genealogy and one’s ancestors within the LDS faith.

LDS doctrine calls for family members from husbands and wives to children to be “sealed” to each other eternally, even after death. It even allows for long-dead family members to be sealed to the family posthumously.

“There’s an Old Testament prophecy that Elijah the prophet would come and turn the hearts of children to their fathers,” Solomon explained. “There’s a link to families to ensure celestial linkage.
“As a Latter-day Saint, I foster the conviction that families are intended to be together forever and not immediate families only. Our collective goal is that there be an eternal welding link through all generations clear back as far as humanly possible and, with God’s help, eventually back to our first parents.”

Called by faith
Thus, it was more than merely a personal interest which drove Solomon as he prepared for his journey in June.

And as research trips go, this one was challenging from the start, in part because of the need to travel halfway across the globe.

“My special challenge is that half of my family is from the Middle East,” he said. “My father is from Syria, and the last of his family left in 1910.”

That was when the country known today as Syria was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, which dissolved following the First World War.

Solomon’s father came to the United States as part of a great immigration wave lasting from approximately 1880 to 1920. Some 12 million persons from around the world passed through Ellis Island and other portals looking for a new life.

Fortunately for the Solomon family, they already had relatives living in Allentown, Penn., and Portland, including the Atiyeh family of Oregon political renown. These connections allowed Solomon’s father to find work in Portland laboring with water, sewer and drainage projects.

Solomon was born when his father was 60 years old, one of seven children. He grew up in Portland and eventually married wife Mary, with whom he has six children, all of them now grown. There also was as stint in the U.S. Army, where he honed his language skills.

Throughout that time, however, both his faith and his personal interest in his family’s unique story drove him to continue his research. Raising a family did not allow him the time or resources needed to travel to Amar el Hosn, his father’s home town in the southwestern part of the country near the Mediterranean coast.

Later on, Solomon said, the September 11 terrorist strikes helped push back his mission even further.

“When 9-11 happened, I just about wrote it off,” he said. “But one-and-a-half years later, I was actually seriously planning to go.”

Off the ground finally
After four years of research and planning, Solomon’s preparation culminated in March, when he departed from Portland International Airport, bound for Damascus. After a jarring taxi ride that took him from the Syrian capital and typical desert conditions, he arrived in Amar el Hosn, a small town of just 150 permanent residents.

Situated in Syria’s lush Christian Valley, the town was a welcome relief with its mountainous terrain and cool air.

“It’s different than any other place in Syria,” Solomon said. “Damascus is hot; it’s as dry as Eastern Oregon. It’s an unusual village in that its people have gone all over the world, and they come back in the summer.”

Solomon immediately got to work, making stops at registry offices and other public facilities in Amar el Hosn and the nearby town of Barshin to study marriage, property and other records that might provide him with clues to his family’s past.

It was difficult work, with many records using non-standard Arabic writing and dialects unfamiliar to Solomon, despite his study of the language at Portland State University.

“It was challenging to read and decipher,” he said. “I was just not prepared for that.”

In addition, he ran into obstacles in the form of non-cooperative public officials reluctant to provide an obvious outsider with too much information, lest he use it to try and claim ownership of property based on family connections. This, Solomon, said, has been a problem in the past because of scanty ownership records.

“There’s suspicion that anyone doing that kind of research is trying to lay claim to ancestral lands,” he said.

He also had trouble finding many government records dating back before Syrian independence in 1946.
In the end, Solomon’s goal of uncovering five generations of directly-connected ancestors on his father’s side of the family went unmet. At the same time, he made progress.

“When I started, I had my father and his parents,” he said. “Now, I have his grandfather and their parents.”

Conserve? Never heard of it
On a personal level, Solomon said, the reception he received from the Syrian people was generally warm, with only a few exceptions. Political discussion was unavoidable, particularly given military operations inside Syrian territory carried out by American forces based in Iraq have caused a number of casualties, he said, but talk usually was curious rather than hostile.

“I only felt it in a taxicab,” he said, describing a solitary experience with a wary driver seemingly determined to dislike him. “I got a very good reception.”

Several things stood out as particularly foreign to Solomon during his time in Syria.

One was a seeming disinterest in water conservation. While Syria boasts some of the best water resources in the region, he still found it disarming for a region that is primarily desert

“Since its all relative, I fully expected water resource conservation would be a high priority,” he said. “I hardly observed anything of the kind.”

Another thing that stood was the ubiquitous nature of satellite dishes and international television.

“Just about everyone in the country has one of those larger-than-life dish antennas, and everyone gets dozens of channels for free,” he said. “Some channels, like ESPN, require a fee for service. Except for news and sports, much of what I saw visiting people’s homes was what one critic of broadcast television once called ‘a vast wasteland.’
“I also observed that politicians being interviewed do not discipline themselves to the 25-second sound bite and rarely get cut off.”

Finally, the apparent disregard for literacy and reading raised alarm bells for someone who calls himself an “avowed bookworm.”

“I got the distinct impression that the only libraries are in universities,” he said.

He had difficulty finding even best-selling authors.

“I was looking for an award-winning novel by a Syrian author and inquired at three or four of the largest bookstores in Homs, a city of a million people,” he recounted. “Only one of the booksellers had ever heard of the author and the store did not carry any of his books.”

It took a trip and further searching before he located a copy in Damascus, a city of 5 million.

Nonetheless, it was the trip of a lifetime for Solomon, who now is settling into his role as head of the Wilsonville Family History Center. He learned a lot about Syria and the Middle East, and even more about his family. And in that regard, he considers his trip as nothing less than successful.

“My view, is after four years of study, it (the Middle East) is not a mosaic, it’s a kaleidoscope of culture and politics and society,” he said. “When I read the history (of Amar el Hosn) it read like a Chamber P.R. piece. But it’s all true. It’s just incredible.”