The Records Around the Family
Family history research doesn't stop with names and dates. In the archives of Chicago Heights and beyond, I began finding the businesses, neighborhoods, relationships, and institutions that surrounded my relatives, and a much larger history than the one my family passed down.
One afternoon, I read every death certificate filed in Chicago Heights, Illinois, in 1928.
I was researching relatives who had lived and worked in this industrial town south of Chicago. But I wasn't looking for one particular name that day. I wanted to know more about the place itself.
The certificates recorded causes of death, ages, and inquests. Some contained the verdict "person or persons unknown." That phrase appeared repeatedly.
Reading the certificates together gave me a different view of Chicago Heights from the one I could have assembled by collecting records for individual relatives.
It also raised questions about the town my family had known, and the conditions in which they had lived.
The Places Between the Records
Much of my research for Family of Mine begins with a person. But following that person often takes me somewhere unexpected.
In 1924, my cousin Dominic, a Chicago Heights bootlegger and jazz-club owner, married Rae, a Kentucky singer who worked for him.
They married in Jeffersonville, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville. No family or friends appear to have been present.
Why Jeffersonville?
Learning that the town had a thriving quickie-marriage business gave me some context. It didn't explain their decision, but it made the location itself worth investigating.
The marriage was no longer just an event in two people's lives. It belonged to a particular place, with its own customs and commercial arrangements.
I am finding this happens frequently. An address or business name that initially seems incidental turns out to be worth following.
What a Photograph Doesn't Explain
My inherited family albums contain photographs of people whose names I know, people I have identified through research, and people I still cannot place.
One cherished wedding portrait remains unidentified. I initially thought I knew who the couple were. I was wrong.
A newly discovered relative circulated the photograph among other family members. Another woman sent a wedding portrait from her own family, dated 1922, for comparison.
The collars suggested that my photograph was earlier.
That was useful. It also meant reconsidering the people I had thought might be in it.
Photographs can be persuasive, especially when they belong to your own family. But recognizing a face, guessing a date, or believing you know the occasion is not the same as establishing an identification.
Sometimes the useful result of research is eliminating an answer.
What Was Within Walking Distance?
One photograph in my grandmother's albums shows my Calabrian great-grandparents on a Chicago porch in 1929.
A handwritten caption identifies their Sicilian landlord as Boss Arrigo.
That name, and particularly the word Boss, sent me looking beyond the people in the photograph.
Who was Arrigo? What did he own? Who lived in his building? What did the neighborhood look like at the time?
I've become interested in reconstructing the geography around my relatives. Not just their addresses, but the businesses, properties, and other people within walking distance.
A neighborhood map can bring relationships into view that are difficult to recognize when each person appears on a separate family-history record.
It doesn't establish that everyone knew everyone else. Proximity is something to investigate, not proof of a relationship.
But it gives me a more useful question to ask than simply whether two people shared a surname.
The Family Story I Didn't Inherit
My grandfather's novena cards are another kind of evidence.
He collected them at daily Mass and put them everywhere, including inside the frames of family photographs. Eventually, the cards obscured our faces.
We used to think this was primarily an expression of his religious devotion. Now I understand it as a way he expressed his love and concern for us.
No official document would have told me that. I needed the family photographs, the objects themselves, and my memory of how he used them.
Other parts of the family history require an almost opposite approach. There are people, businesses, and relationships preserved in public records that barely registered in the stories I grew up with.
A relative who married a rodeo queen. A family business documented by the Library of Congress. People who lived only a couple of hours away and were never part of our family life.
I can establish that they existed and that we were related. Understanding why I knew nothing about them is more difficult.
Beyond the Family Tree
Family of Mine began as an attempt to reconstruct a South Italian family history across generations and continents.
The family tree is essential to that work. But it cannot account for the world in which these people lived.
For that, I have needed property records, city directories, newspapers, court documents, photographs, death certificates, maps, and government investigative files. I have also needed to return repeatedly to the albums and interviews I inherited.
The question has changed as the research has developed.
I still want to know who these people were and what happened to them. I also want to understand the businesses they operated, the institutions they dealt with, the neighborhoods they inhabited, and the forms of power they lived alongside.
Some of this history was recorded in considerable detail.
It just wasn't passed down to me.
That is the distance I'm trying to close.
For a look at the discoveries and fellow researchers that sent me back to these records, read Back to the Archive: When the Clues Started Connecting.
The Awning Steals My Attention
A family album may tell you who somebody wanted remembered. The background can tell you where they actually were.
The photograph was supposed to be about three girls.
My mother, at five years old, stands in the middle, flanked by two of her young aunts only a few years older than she was. It’s Little Italy, Chicago, about 1940. They are dressed for school, or whatever girls dressed for, facing the camera and squinting into the light.
For a long time, I saw three little girls. Then the background began to matter more.
Behind the girls were parked cars, a hydrant, houses, storefronts and a striped awning across the street. None of it had been included deliberately. It was simply what happened to be there when someone raised the camera.
I enlarged the photograph.
From my grandmother’s album, © 2026 Anastasia Ashman.
On the awning I could make out a number:
629
Then a name:
F. A. Costantino?
It was the number that stopped me.
A census record had recently placed for me that my grandmother lived at 628 South Racine Street on Chicago’s Near West Side.
The storefront in the photograph was 629.
The camera had been pointed almost directly across the street from the homestead.
Suddenly this was no longer just a family photograph taken somewhere in the old Italian neighborhood. It had coordinates.
The background became the evidence
No one taking that picture in 1940 cared whether the address across the street was legible.
They wanted the children.
Yet decades later, the incidental details became more useful to me.
The awning fixed the location. The census supplied the opposite address. Together they put my mother on a particular piece of sidewalk.
Once I knew where she was standing, I went looking for the block.
It no longer exists.
This is where 629 Racine Street was in 1940. It’s now a parking lot for the University of Illinois. Via Google Maps.
The site of 629 South Racine is now part of a radically altered landscape. The building is gone. So are the neighboring structures visible behind the girls.
Much of Chicago’s Near West Side was demolished and remade during the urban-renewal era, including the construction of the University of Illinois Chicago’s Circle Campus. The displacement of residents and destruction of the surrounding neighborhood are well documented by UIC’s Near West Side Renewal Project.
I had known that history in general terms.
That is different from discovering that one of the vanished sidewalks was my mother’s.
Family albums record more than families
Since making this discovery, I have started inspecting old photographs differently.
I still look at the people. But I also look around them.
Street numbers.
Store signs.
License plates.
Porches.
Window lettering.
Cars.
The edge of another building.
Anything that might have seemed too ordinary to identify at the time.
Family photographs are full of this accidental information. They preserve a version of the built world precisely because nobody thought the built world was the subject.
Another photograph in my archive helped start the entire Family of Mine project. My grandmother had written beneath it:
I came to concentrate on the mysterious “Boss Arrigo.”
But that photograph was doing something else at the same time. It recorded a Chicago building where family life and commerce occupied the same address, with apartments above and businesses below.
The caption pointed me toward a man.
The image preserved an environment.
That distinction now seems important.
A family album may tell you who somebody wanted remembered. The background can tell you where they actually were.
And sometimes the city removes the second thing before anyone realizes it mattered.
The buildings disappeared from Racine Street.
The photograph did not.