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.
308 Nightclubs for 14,000 People
I knew nothing about Calumet City until my family story led me to nearby Chicago Heights.
Calumet City sits right on the Illinois-Indiana state line, in the middle of a region I had mostly understood through industry: steel mills, factories, rail lines, refineries, workers moving back and forth across municipal boundaries that meant less economically than they did on a map.
Then I found a January 1941 spread in Life about Calumet City nightlife.
Population: 14,000.
Bars and taverns: 308.
That works out to almost one drinking establishment for every forty-five residents.
I grew up in a university town with more coffee shops than bars, so perhaps my scale is distorted. But 308 still seemed like a lot.
Way too many for the local population alone.
Which made me stop looking at the clubs themselves and ask a different question.
Who was keeping them in business?
The answer started to come into focus when I looked at what surrounded Calumet City and Chicago Heights.
Steel mills. Factories. Rail yards. Industrial plants. Thousands of men working shifts that started and ended at all hours.
This was not a nine-to-five landscape.
A worker finishing late at night did not necessarily want to go home to bed. Someone getting off before dawn did not need entertainment to wait until evening.
And apparently it didn’t.
One of the musicians working the Calumet City circuit was Sun Ra.
I once got to see him at the Village Vanguard in New York. Sun Ra!
Years later, he remembered playing the Calumet City clubs from evening until nearly dawn. The schedule sounds punishing from the musician’s side. The shows were staggered, so when one club paused for an intermission, a performer could move to another and play there.
The entertainment kept circulating.
One room slowed down. Another picked up.
The night did not end just because one set did.
That detail made the whole place look different to me.
On one stretch of State Street, twenty-six taverns and nightclubs occupied just two blocks.
Some stayed open for most of the day and night.
Many employed B-girls whose job included getting male customers to buy more drinks.
That is the kind of detail that makes the economics visible.
A customer was not simply buying liquor.
He was buying time.
Liquor. Music. Gambling. Food. Cigarettes. Women. Company. Spectacle.
I had been encountering all of these things separately in the records.
A tavern here. A nightclub there. A gambling room. Jukeboxes. A restaurant. A hotel. A floor show.
Taken one at a time, they looked like nightlife. Together, they began to look like an economy.
And not just any economy, an entertainment economy built right next to the industrial one.
The factories and mills produced wages. They also produced exhaustion, odd hours, transient populations, single men, married men away from home, salesmen, drivers, travelers and workers whose lives were organized around shifts instead of evenings.
The clubs were positioned to absorb some of that money.
Not necessarily in one dramatic night.
A drink here. A meal there. A few songs. A bet. Cigarettes. Another drink. Another room.
The point is not that every steelworker spent his paycheck on State Street.
I cannot know that, and I do not want to invent him.
The point is that an entertainment district this dense had to be feeding on something larger than Calumet City itself.
The industrial belt supplied the customers.
And geography mattered.
If you worked in Chicago Heights or somewhere nearby, you did not have to drive thirty miles into Chicago to find a night out.
Nightlife came to you.
That may be the part I had been missing.
I had been looking at the men who ran things.
The owners. The operators. The gamblers. The people moving liquor, money, machines and influence.
But none of that explains itself.
Supply requires demand.
And around Chicago Heights and Calumet City, industry seems to have created both the money and the schedule for an after-dark economy to thrive.
Getting answers I wasn’t looking for, Summer 2026
I’m new over on Substack. I keep typing Chicago Heights into the search bar, looking for my people. Nothing much comes up. Then the town we should know better than we do gets a juicy mention in this deep dive into South Italian power networks.
It’s been a season of annotated conversations. Since I started publishing Family of Mine on Substack this summer, other people’s posts have kept changing what I can see in my own archive.
A quickie-marriage town. A nickname. An unidentified wedding couple. Murder verdicts. Novena cards over tomatoes. A map that made power look like walking distance.
Something catches, and I go back.
Here’s where you can read the whole thing at Substack. Please visit!
And here’s a selection from it:
Chicago Heights enters the conversation
I’m new over on Substack. I keep typing Chicago Heights into the search bar, looking for my people. Nothing much comes up. Then the town we should know better than we do gets a juicy mention in this deep dive into South Italian power networks.
Getting an inside look at Jeffersonville
Jeffersonville is another town I didn’t expect to matter.
In 1924, my cousin Dominic, a Chicago Heights bootlegger and jazz-club owner, married Rae, a Kentucky singer who worked for him, there. No family or friends appear to have been present.
Jeffersonville was a quickie-marriage town across the river from Louisville. It was also known as “Little Chicago.”
Why did they choose Jeffersonville? Why did they cross their own state lines to marry there?
For a small town, Jeffersonville captures an outsized role in so many threads I’ve picked up. One is, it’s the quickie marriage town my jazz club-owning cousin married his flapper-singer wife with no family or friends present, in 1924. I’m still searching for the reason why. (And, I keep finding flood pictures when I research Jeffersonville!!) - me
Nobody has named the couple yet
The first identification I made about a cherished wedding portrait was wrong.
Then the photograph started traveling.
A newly discovered relative helped me by showing it around. Another woman sent us her own family wedding portrait from 1922 to compare. The collars convinced me my photo was earlier.
A question about the actual world a historical person navigated sent me back to an afternoon I spent reading every 1928 death certificate filed in one town.
The causes of death, the ages, the inquests, the repeated “person or persons unknown” verdicts gave me something no single family record had.
They gave me Chicago Heights.
Oof! … My cousins were involved
Then somebody posted photographs of the home where a Mafia induction ceremony had been recorded by the FBI.
I knew the ceremony already.
My cousins entered the record around it.
Novena cards over the tomatoes
My grandfather collected novena cards at daily Mass and put them everywhere. Under desk blotters. Into the frames of our school portraits. Eventually they crowded out our faces.
My sister once gave my grandparents a framed photograph of her cat and told them, “This is the only great-grandchild you will get from me.”
Soon the cat was fully covered by a pastel Jesus. We thought he loved Jesus. Now I understand this is how he showed he loved us.
My grandfather absolutely trafficked in these novena cards which he collected at daily mass. He slipped them under desk blotters, into picture frames of school portraits, eventually crowding out our faces. Even the framed photo of my sister’s cat that she gifted them, saying “this is the only great grandchild you will get from me”, was soon covered with a pastel Jesus. - me
Assembled. After the fact.
My family stories were not passed down to me as lore. I am assembling them afterward from public records.
What keeps surprising me is how close some of these vanished lives were.
A fourth cousin who married a rodeo queen. A family business preserved by the Library of Congress. Relatives who lived only a couple of hours away.
They were not lost to history.
They were lost to us.
Power networks within walking distance
So much was within walking distance.
Ben Sangster’s map of Milwaukee LCN members at the beginning of Prohibition made me look again at proximity itself: who lived near whom, who worked near whom, what could be reached on foot.
Neighborhoods matter. Buildings matter. Porches matter.
I went straight back to the 1929 porch.
To my Calabrian great-grandparents and their Sicilian landlord.
Boss Arrigo.
Did I get the answers I was looking for, someone asked me.