No Museum-Quality Scans For Me
I needed to properly scan my grandmother’s old photograph albums to do them justice. It was a project to do before I could do much else with them.
High resolution. Careful handling, white gloves, even! Useful, consistent file names. The whole museum-quality project.
I never did it.
What actually unlocked the albums was my iPhone.
I started taking quick photographs of the pages. Nothing fancy. In a bright diffusely lit room, I tried to steady the phone at a 90 degree angle to the prints.
Once the pictures were in iPhoto, I could enlarge them, crop individual faces, reorder them, compare photographs from different albums and use iPhoto’s facial recognition to suggest possible matches. © 2026 Anastasia Ashman
Suddenly I was looking at the pictures all the time.
That mattered.
As my genealogy research moved farther back — eventually eight or ten generations in some branches — the photographs and the family tree began working together. A name in a record could lead me back to a face. A face I had seen in my lifetime occurred repeatedly through history.
I began attaching identified photographs to people in the tree and getting much more familiar with who belonged to whom.
The proper scanning project still exists somewhere in my future.
But the fast, dirty version is what got the research moving.
My Cousin Married A Rodeo Queen
History waits for the person who cares.
Finally, a couple years ago, I looked at my own family.
I never knew we are part of living California history.
…or that we’re in the Library of Congress (LOC)? I stumbled on cousins with a place in its American Folklife Center.
Geneaology work had led me back to a Calabrian mountain village in 1803, to a branch of my tree that eventually grew to sit thousands of miles away, right in my grandparent’s back yard.
Not the back porch in Little Italy.
Instead this cold trail led from my grandfather’s grandfather’s brother and took me down to around Gilroy, that place with the Garlic Festival. Down to the tiny hamlet of San Martin, on an agricultural stretch of the old Camino Real that once connected Spanish missions running the length of the state. Just south of my grandparents' place in the valley of San Jose.
Helen married my fourth cousin Tony, whose Filice surname rings a distant bell.
Outside of FILICE'S WESTERN STORE from The Library of Congress, photographed by Ken Light in 1989.
Elaine and her western world was not part of my family identity. We were not horsey people.
I imagine we had unknowingly driven past her and Tony’s 40-year old business, known as “a real rancher’s place” selling tack and apparel. Helen Elaine Martin Filice may be new to me but she belongs to California history.
Black and white photographs in the Italian Americans in the West Project collection at the LOC show the outside of FILICE'S WESTERN STORE. The sign is decorated with a saddle on one side and a boot on the other. A big brown fiberglass horse stands under the sign, beckoning drivers in.
Helen Elaine Martin Filice, Miss Grand National 1965. From her obituary.
A homecoming queen and a cheerleader, Helen became Miss Grand National 1965 at the Cow Palace, and a Sweetheart at the Salinas Rodeo, her recent obituary shares. She is pictured standing with her tall, dark horse. A tailored light-colored suit and wide-brimmed hat, gloved hand resting at the bridle, her face tilted to look her beloved horse in the eye. A whitewashed paddock fence recedes into oak-dotted hills.
Her death notice explains she married my cousin Tony at Mission San Juan Bautista, the same site from Hitchcock's film Vertigo where Kim Novak's character fell to her death from the bell tower.
Google Street View tells me the horse statue is still there, painted stark white. The store is a Boot Barn now.
Before Helen was crowned Rodeo Queen another local highschooler, in chaps and cowboy boots, won the title at the Cow Palace. She would go on to become a supervisor, a mayor, and a U.S. senator. (Image from CowPalace.com)
The Cow Palace is familiar to me, but not as a rodeo venue. As a teenager I blew up balloons for a Rolling Stones concert there.
Helen’s fiberglass horse outlasted the family members who put it there. We’re lucky it kept marking that stretch of western road. Now I know we are horsey people after all.
Father, Mother + Boss Arrigo
Family of Mine reconstructs a South Italian network spanning migration, neighborhood commerce, political power, and organized crime, then follows how its history was stripped away as its outcomes became respectable American inheritance.
A family photograph preserved the title. The explanation did not survive with it.
1929, Little Italy, Chicago. © 2026 Anastasia Ashman
The handwritten caption above one photograph in my grandmother’s album reads:
Father Mother + Boss Arrigo.
As a child, I would stop at this page and wonder about the final name.
Why Boss?
Boss of what?
The photograph shows my great-grandmother standing beside two seated men. My great-grandfather sits in the middle. The older, mustachioed man on the right is half cut out of frame, and identified only by his surname and title.
Nothing else in the album explains who he was, what authority he held or why my grandmother expected the word Bossto be understood. This is where the project begins: not with something I remember, but with something the family record preserved and could no longer explain.
The photograph preserved the moment, the people, and the title but not the world that made the title meaningful.
Decades passed. Recently, I dug into this photo. My research placed this 1929-dated scene in Chicago on the back porch of my grandmother’s building. For the first time, I looked up the address shown in the Census reports. A mixed-use brick structure on South Racine Avenue with a four story wooden porch on the rear. Two Sicilian Arrigo brothers purchased the property in 1910 and lived there with their families. My great-grandparents rented an apartment in the building for decades. It stood on a major commercial artery between in Chicago’s Near West Side, in the immigrant neighborhood called Little Italy. The building still stands today and is landmarked on the National Register of Historic Places as the Jennie Foley-Victor A. Arrigo Building.
My grandmother’s scrawl
Those facts answered where the photograph had been taken and established one relationship between the families.
They did not explain the caption.
That gap became one of the starting points for my book-in-progress, Family of Mine.
This is not a story passed down. It’s assembled after the fact.
What began as family-history research grew into Family of Mine, a narrative nonfiction investigation using photographs, genealogy, newspapers, government files and physical places to recover a history that survived without its explanation.
This blog shares individual pieces of that investigation. The book connects the larger system; here, each post begins with one photograph, object, document, place, sentence or question.
The first clue was a single word written above a family photograph:
Boss.
Research notes from Family of Mine, a narrative nonfiction investigation using photographs, genealogy, public records and institutional archives to examine migration, informal economies and the making of American respectability.