The Nassif Name
The living record

Stories of the Name

History books hold the famous Nassifs. These pages hold the rest of us — one family's journey at a time.

Every Nassif family carries a chapter the archives never recorded: the village left behind, the steamship ticket, the name re-spelled at a registry desk, the first shop, the first harvest, the first child born under a new flag. This page collects those chapters as family members share them. Each story is published with the teller's blessing, in their own words, lightly edited for length.

From Ain Arab to Cedar Rapids, on Christmas Eve

The Elias G. Nassif family · Ain Arab, Lebanon → Marion, Iowa · told from the public record

Elias G. Nassif was fifteen years old when he left the village of Ain Arab, Lebanon, with his younger brother Edward. They arrived in Marion, Iowa on December 24, 1958 — Christmas Eve — joining the Lebanese community that had been putting down roots in the Cedar Rapids area since the 1890s.

Elias joined St. George Orthodox Church, the parish at the heart of that community, and married Souham “Susie” Haddy — herself from Ain Arab — in 1968. Together they owned and ran several well-loved Cedar Rapids-area restaurants over the decades that followed. He died in 2026, at eighty-two, in the city that had been home for nearly seventy years.

This first story is drawn, with respect, from Elias's published obituary in the Cedar Rapids Gazette (March 2026) — a placeholder for the family-told stories this page is waiting for.

The Mother Mosque of America in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
The Mother Mosque of America, Cedar Rapids (1934) — the oldest still-standing purpose-built mosque in the United States, raised by the same Levantine community the Nassifs of Iowa belong to. Photo: ArtisticAbode, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Share your family's story

Did your grandparents leave Mashghara, Zahle, Damascus — or a village whose name you're still tracing? We would be honored to add your chapter. Stories are only ever published with your permission.