The province has a strong and thriving Lebanese community dating back well over 100 years. The names are familiar to many, Bashas, Boulos’, Tootons, Alteens, Gosines and Michaels just to name a few.
Count actor and producer Terri Andrews among them. She grew up surrounded by her Lebanese family including her grandmother, and many cousins.
Christian Lebanese families fled persecution and economic difficulties in their homeland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and spread out across the world…some of them ending up in Newfoundland.
Terri Andrews says her grandparents settled in St. John’s and raised a large family but never forgot where they came from. That’s what prompted her to make the pilgrimage back to the mountains of Lebanon to find her roots.
(Terri Andrews via Facebook.)
She says she and a friend booked a hotel for one night in Beirut and when they asked why she was there, she told them “to find my family.” When they got in the hotel room there was a note on the bedside table that said “Welcome Home.”
Andrews says her cousin, Lorraine Michael, managed to locate her grandmother’s nephew living in a house built on top of the original family home. When Andrews met her cousin, who was by then an elderly man, his response was powerful.
When she told him she was his aunt’s granddaughter, he started to cry, saying he knew someone from his aunt’s family would come back to see him.
It turns out that 50 years previous, her cousin Daniel would write to his auntie in Newfoundland in English to practice his English language skills, but Andrews says while her grandmother could speak English, she could only write and read in Arabic, so 9-year-old Terri would read her cousin’s letters to his aunt. She told Daniel that she had all his letters and would read them to his aunt (her grandmother).
