However, the family’s life was turned into one of tragedy and hardship when her physician father died in 1895. Two years later, in 1897, Karam Hanna Saleh Karam, her paternal relative, proposed marriage to her. He was a merchant who had amassed a considerable fortune through his business dealings in the United States. He was 13 years older than her. She left school and married him that same year, while still not yet fourteen years old, and he took her, along with her mother, Frosina, and her younger sister, Amina, to where he was based for business, in the city of Shreveport, Louisiana.
