Many families were divided due to immigration. David Alkazin left the United States in 1900 with his daughter, Rosa, and son, Elias. It was a full six years before their mother and his wife, Mariam, followed with the younger children. Mariam and her children, Alice, Michel, Afife, and Antsun, traveled across the Atlantic on the La Trourraine for 9 days and arrived in New York on November 12, 1906, where they were reunited with the rest of the family.

The youngest, Afife (Ethel), may have never met her father, as he left Lebanon the year she was born. In the United States, the family name was spelled Alkazin, but on the manifest, it is spelled Kazem. Al-Khazin literally means “the treasurer.”  When the “al” was dropped, the name became simply “treasurer.” Some of the family’s first names were also changed. Mariam became Mary, Afife became Ethel, and Antsun became Anthony.