Until recent decades, personal archives have been largely sidelined in the Information Science field for a putative lack of evidentiary value. In the case of migrants’ personal archives, evidence is not necessarily tied to an event or transaction, but rather an identity, a personhood, or a belonging. The study of personal archives aids us in our reimagining of what constitutes an archive, and further helps us to interrogate the very principle of evidentiary value that is imposed on archival materials. In the same way the post-structuralist turn in archival theory has emphasized the active role of archivists and archives alike in creating and shaping historical narratives rather than merely preserving them, both the processes and materials comprising personal archives and other information practices of diasporic subjects are highly consequential in identity-formation — building identities rather than merely memorializing them. Codes, heirlooms, pictures, art, film, and other collected materials serve to represent identity in lack of a spatial homeland to inhabit which legitimizes that claim. For the descendants of Ottoman immigrants, they are a means of reimagining what it truly means to be of a place, repurposing pasts to fit into the new spaces and disparate geographies that are inhabited presently. Archiving here becomes a quite dialogical act, one which generates migrants’ identities rather than claiming to subsume them into collective identity as some criterion or rite of passage. This paper considers the role of personal archiving as an information practice in these subjects’ constructions and understandings of the self. It examines the personal records of Arab migrants from the Ottoman Empire and their children in the United States, including a recorded oral history of a Syrian immigrant in Massachusetts, and the written records of the son of a Palestinian migrant who fled to New York during the seferberlik. These private archival materials bring insight into the attitudes and transformations of diaspora subjects, demystifying processes of assimilation and emphasizing the role of information practices including the construction of personal archives as well as the creation of information grounds such as the mahrajan in maintaining cultural boundaries in the mahjar. Studying these personal fonds helps us to understand the future of what it means to be an agent of this diaspora, as they tether people to their heritage and simultaneously create new ways of embodying that identity.