Joseph Caram was a passenger on Titanic.
Background[]
Born as Yūsuf Karam, he was a native of the small village Kafr Mishkī in the Beqaa valley of Syria. The place now belongs to the Lebanon. He was born in 1884. It could be that his surname was Kareem.
He had emgirated to Ottawa in Canada at some point, where he had his own business. He changed his name to Joseph Caram to integrate in the new land.
In 1910, another Syrian-Canadian grocer, Mariyam Assāf Khalīl, visited the village where she was born and where her sons and husband were living. She traded in the same street as Joseph. In 1912, she wanted to go back. She took a cousin and a nephew’s son with her. Joseph had just wed Mārīyah Ilyās Khalīl at that time. She was 10 years younger than him. He visited Syria to ask for her hand.
Joseph Karam was possibly part of the group of Kafr Mishkī migrants or a relative of Mariyam, but nevertheless he set out to go to France with his wife, from where the couple would take a voyage aboard an ocean liner. Mariyam went to Beirut in the Northwest, where a ship would take her and her relatives to Marseilles. It’s likely that Joseph and Maria were travelling the same route.
Titanic[]
He must have been close to 28 years old when he was in Cherbourg on the grandest vessel the world ever saw. It was the evening of April 10 when they were leaving the mainland of France behind aboard Titanic in Third Class.
On April 14, late at night, disaster struck as the ship had collided with an iceberg. Water poured in through small crevices that had occured due to the contact on starboard side.
On April 15, the ship had to be evacuated and the lifeboats were readied after midnight, as Captain Smith now knew she was going to sink. For the Syrian passengers down in steerage, it was hard to figure out what was going on and they were held back by the gates.
The couple didn’t make it off the ship in a lifeboat and perished when Titanic sank from underneath them at 2:20 A.M. Their bodies were never identified.
However, one of the bodies that the CS Mackay-Bennett had found, remained unidentified but was described as a male in his thirties, probably from Third Class and was falsely believed to be an Italian. He was given number #28 and had dark hair and a dark complexion. The address he was headed to was 155 Broad Street in Ottawa. This is the same street where Joseph’s fellow Syrian Meriyam Assāf Khalīl had her grocery. She later confirmed she lost three relatives. The body was given a sea burial, but it is possible that this was Joseph Caram