A problem with following my family through public records is that the records rarely stay inside the family.
A name leads to an address.
The address leads to a business.
The business leads to somebody else.
That is how I ended up deep in a federal file, staring at the name of a beauty salon.
Park Lane Beauty Salon.
Then it appeared again.
1135 West 127th Street
Park Lane was at 1135 West 127th Street in Calumet Park, just south of Chicago.
The first time I saw it in the file, I barely registered it.
There were hundreds of pages. Names, addresses, cars, telephone calls, businesses, trips.
A beauty salon did not seem particularly important.
Then the FBI mentioned it again.
And again.
By October 1964, an investigator for the Illinois Crime Commission had gone into Park Lane looking for a woman connected to the file.
He interviewed one of the employees.
She gave him almost nothing.
The woman he wanted, she said, was vacationing in Italy.
Then she refused to tell him her name.
That was the entire exchange.
And it made it into the federal record.
I keep coming back to it.
An investigator walks into a neighborhood beauty salon asking questions.
An employee tells him that the person he wants is on another continent.
Then she stops talking.
An FBI report records daily travel to Park Lane Beauty Salon and notes that the business opened Dec. 6, 1963. FBI File 92-5793, Chicago Field Office File 92-920. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scan via Internet Archive. Emphasis my own.
The file preserves the refusal.
The salon kept coming back
Once I noticed Park Lane, I started seeing it everywhere.
A report noted who managed it.
Another recorded where that person was living.
Another described who was believed to own the business.
Another put the license in somebody else's name.
Investigators went to the salon looking for people.
Informants talked about its customers.
Travel appeared.
An FBI report records Illinois Crime Commission investigator questioning an employee of Park Lane Beauty Salon in October 1964. FBI File 92-5793, Chicago Field Office File 92-920, report dated Dec. 18, 1964, p. 8. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scan via Internet Archive.
Telephone calls appeared.
So did local gossip.
None of these fragments explains the salon by itself.
Together, they made me realize I had been reading the file incorrectly.
I had been looking for events.
The file was recording relationships.
A perfectly ordinary business
A beauty salon is an unusually intimate kind of neighborhood business.
People sit there for an hour.
They talk.
They know who has gone away, who is back, who is seeing whom, who has moved, who owns what.
They notice cars.
They notice absences.
They know who has gone to Italy.
The FBI file does not call any of that an archive.
But it becomes one.
The Bureau collected information from employees, investigators, informants and business records.
It noted addresses.
It noted movements.
It noted who could be found where.
And then, in the middle of all that, a woman working in a beauty salon says the manager is in Italy.
No, she will not tell you her name.
That sentence survives more than sixty years.
Looking past the obvious records
When I started Family of Mine, I thought the useful records would be the obvious ones.
Birth certificates.
Marriage records.
Census pages.
Immigration files.
Property records.
The documents designed to tell you who someone was.
But the further I go, the more interested I become in records that were never meant to preserve a family story at all.
A photograph keeps a street.
A death record keeps a workplace.
And a federal file keeps a beauty salon.
Not because anyone thought I would come looking for it.
Because somebody once asked a question there.
And somebody else decided not to answer.
