A Baton Rouge family’s LSU tailgate has landed them a spot on national TV.
The Karam family recently appeared in an advertisement for Ancestry.com, which explored their Lebanese heritage through the lens of their long-standing tailgate, known as The Party Box.
Robbie Mahtook said his family was selected after a national search for tailgating families. Seeing the family on TV has been unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
“It’s been pretty amazing to hear from different people,” he said. “They’ll call and say ‘Oh, hey, we just saw you and the family on TV.’ We’ve had people from Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arizona call and tell us they saw the commercial during sporting events, soap operas, different program types.
Mahtook says sharing the story of his family’s history and their traditions with the world — and going through the process together, has been powerful.
A still from the Karam family’s Ancestry.com ad, which highlights their Lebanese heritage as well as their Party Box tailgate.
Begun by Hab Karam and some friends and family, the Party Box has been going strong since 1987. The Ancestry.com advertisement focuses families who keep traditions alive from one generation through the next. With the Karam family, it focuses on the tailgate — showing the event itself, as well as the culinary preparation — and the way the family’s Lebanese heritage makes itself felt.
Interestingly, that heritage doesn’t necessarily come through in the food, which tends to be standard tailgate fare like jambalaya and fried foods.
“It really comes through in the camaraderie, the family and friends aspect,” Mahtook said. “We use family as a very loose term. While it’s, of course, for blood relations — we’re very close-knit — we always view family as friends and as people who want to celebrate with us.”
He says when anyone shows up to The Party Box on any given Saturday, they will find a lot of blood relations visiting and celebrating together.
“But also a lot of friends who’ll tell you stories about how they’ve been coming, in some cases, since the very beginning,” he said. “They share the sense of family that we have amongst ourselves.”
Mahtook’s great-grandparents emigrated to the United States from Lebanon around the turn of the 20th century. As it happens, the family has previously made use of Ancestry.com to trace their lineage, ending up with a tree that covers around 760 people.
This time around, with a bit of extra help, they learned even more.
“We had a pretty good understanding of who everybody was once they got to America, but we really did not have a good understanding who our ancestors were before they came,” Mahtook said.
Another gameday, another celebration at the Karam family’s tailgate.
“With the help of the Ancestry people we were able to go back a couple more generations, back to people who never made it over from Lebanon, but who (the genealogists) knew through historical records were our ancestors.”
Based in Utah, Ancestry.com is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world. Currently, the Karam family’s advertisement has over 1,100 views on Facebook
Family member Camille Karam, currently a graduate student at LSU, had a small role in the background of the advertisement. She said the experience was unforgettable.
“It honestly felt like one of the best experiences for our family,” she said. “People were phoning up saying ‘I saw you on TV, I saw your brother on TV.’ It’s a feeling I’d never felt before. It was very cool.”
She said the family attended a Lebanese convention every year, and credited her grandparents for making the family hyper-aware of its heritage.
“We’re always looking for the next opportunity (to get together), whether it’s tailgating, holidays or the Lebanese convention,” she said.
“It’s been really neat to see how our family spreads across not just the United States, but the world.”
