There wasn't as much online as there is from other famous Palestinian families who proudly trace their histories to companions of Mohammed in Arabia.
But about ten years ago, one member of the family seemed to go through social media to see all the the Shtayyehs he could find, and he made a slide show showing dozens of them and a very short bio on each.
While a few live now in Nablus, where Mohammed Shtayyeh was born, the home town of most of them is Damietta, Egypt.
And the Egyptian origin of the family seems likely. A monograph by the JCPA reminds us that Hamas leader Fathi Hammad once said:
Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Damietta, from the north, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians; we are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are part of you [in mainland Egypt]. Egyptians! Personally, half my family is Egyptian – and the other half are Saudis.
The paper goes on to say that it is well known that Egyptians settled in major cities in Palestine in the 19th century, including Nablus. One of their footnotes says that an Israeli researcher checked the Nablus phone book in 1980 and found 70 entries for the name "al-Masri," "The Egyptian," alone.
This Arabic article on Arab family name origins freely admits that a great number of Palestinian families immigrated from elsewhere. The head of the Palestinian History and Documentation Center, Khaled Al-Khalidi, notes that original Palestinian family names came from well known Gulf Arab tribes, like Al-Ayyubi, Al-Ansari, Al-Hashemi, and Al-Qurashi. Later families took on named from where they came from, so that's why so many Palestinian families are named after Syrian, Arabian or Egyptian areas (al-Hijazi, al-Halabi [Aleppo], and al-Dimashqi [Damascus], al-Suisi, al-Gharbawi, al-Sharqawi, and al-Araishi.)
This Palestinian expert freely admits that "the Palestinian people are part of the Arabian Peninsula, and at that time there was free movement, and there were no borders between Arab areas."
To the West, Palestinians claim to be indigenous to the area. In Arabic, they know the truth that many if not most originated elsewhere - and they are proud of it.
