Why this record exists
Every family holds a memory that lives in the breasts of its elders; when they go, it goes with them. Ours was displaced three times in two centuries — from the Hejaz to Egypt, from Egypt to Beersheba, from Beersheba to Khan Younis and the diaspora — and each time something was lost: land, a house, names.
This record is an attempt to give the family one place that cannot be displaced: where a member finds their name and their line of descent, where a child reads where they came from, and where those who know what we do not can add it. Open in Arabic and English together, because some of our grandchildren were born far away and do not read Arabic — and they are the ones most in need of being joined to their root.
Method
No name is entered without a source, and no probability is presented as certainty. What was unclear is entered with the mark ٭; dates inferred by calculation are stated as inference; and what is unknown is left blank, waiting for whoever can fill it — a known gap being better than a written guess.
A family carried on the move three times, and not one name was lost. Keep what is in your hands — those who come after will ask you for it.
The chronicler
سلامة سالم أبو موسى
Every name in this tree and every burial place on this map traces back to one man who sat and wrote by hand what was about to be lost — the family’s lineages, its graves and the account of its migration, entering women alongside men. This site is no more than the transfer of his work onto a medium that does not decay.
Who transcribed and extended it
Osama Waheed Salman Abu Mousa
Ninth generation from Zain al-Din al-Harbi
Software engineering · Academic background in architecture
My vision
That this record grows through the participation of every member of the family, until it becomes a living reference passed down like a name or a piece of land — not a project that stops at two hundred and seventy names, but a beginning.
A message to the reader
If you find a missing name, an error, or a story about a family member — write to me. This record belongs to all of you, not to me alone, and it will not be complete without you.