THE America that drew my family was 7,000 miles from where they started, in old Marjayoun, in what is now Lebanon.

My aunts and uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents, were part of a century-long wave of migration that occurred as the Ottoman Empire crumbled, then fell, around the time of World War I. In the hinterland of what was then part of Greater Syria, the war marked years of violent anarchy that made bloodshed casual. Disease was rife. So was famine. Hundreds of thousands starved in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and beyond. My family’s region was not spared. A survey of 182 villages in the area showed that a fourth of the homes withered into wartime ruin, and more than a third of the people who had inhabited them had died.

This horrific decade and its aftermath provoked villagers — including my family — to abandon their homes for locations ranging from South America to West Africa to Australia, as well as a few neighborhoods in Oklahoma City and Wichita, Kan.

The mountain roads and voyages in steerage that my aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents traveled to get here were treacherous. But the hardest were those first miles from home, away from faces that would no longer be familiar. By the time we arrived in New York or Texas or Oklahoma, or wherever, much was lost.