In a brief comment on the globalization of professional history writing, Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that despite the globalization of the discipline of history, traces of traditions of historiography, marginalized by the university in the non-Western world, can still be found in amateur history. But can amateur history be understood beyond just being a leftover or remnant of a past before the professionalization of history within the domain of the university? Is it an attempt to authenticate local identities in a time of globalization of family networks? How are we to think through the writing of amateur history in a non-western/non-globalized paradigm that is at the same time conditioned by a global encounter? Looking at amateur history writing on South Lebanon published in the 1950s, this paper argues that this type of history writing was the product of two crises: the pace of emigration from South Lebanon to the Americas and the marginalization of South Lebanon as a region in the newly independent Lebanese Republic. Mining a local archive of collective memory, oral histories, and private papers, amateur history traced personal and collective genealogies of the Greek Orthodox Christian families of the region from their origins as tribes in Yemen, their migration through Jordan and Hawran in Syria, their settlement of South Lebanon, and further along the lines of their emigration to the Americas. Coming at a time when the chains of collective history telling were under the threat of being broken by urbanization and emigration, amateur history attempted to constitute a written record and a link between a tribal, Arab past and an overseas future. The paper places amateur history within the legacy of the pan-Arabism of the interwar years and the persistence of a regional identity across state borders, including the border with Israel. It argues that through building on a localized archive and stories of origin, amateur history posited a challenge both to the conception of the newborn Lebanese state as well as to the professional history writing that accompanied it.