Father, Mother + Boss Arrigo

A family photograph preserved the title. The explanation did not survive with it.

1929, Little Italy, Chicago.

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.