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.
My Grandfather Wore A Diamond Horseshoe Pin
For years, this was a photograph of my grandfather as a young man among others in my grandmother’s albums.
Studio portrait. Newsboy cap. Dark overcoat. Striped tie. Seventeen? Eighteen? He looks serious, but not solemn. Carefully dressed in street garb without looking formal.
If I dated this right, he had left school and was working as a grocery store clerk.
Then I enlarged the photograph on my phone.
Fastened to his luscious striped silk tie was a tiny sparkly horseshoe.
I had never noticed it.
My grandfather around 1930, when he was a young grocery clerk in Chicago. © 2026 Anastasia Ashman
It appears to be silver or platinum and set with small clear stones. Rhinestones, perhaps. I hope. Diamonds, perhaps. The photograph cannot tell me.
It is not subtle.
Once I saw it, the portrait changed.
The coat and cap belong to an ordinary young working man. The pin introduces something else. A little flash. A little luck. A little display.
And, apparently, another horse.
And piece of jewelry doesn’t prove anything.
But this has become a recurring finding in my family photographs. Evidence of something I can’t explain.
A pinkie ring appears in more than one photograph.
Men turn up in good suits.
There are tenements in the background sometimes, yes, but also cars positioned just inside the picture.
There are formal portraits, jewelry, carefully chosen clothes, the small signals people use when they want to present themselves as having arrived, or at least as being on their way.
The written records are much less expressive.
A census might say clerk.
My family did not leave behind explanations saying, Here is how we got from there to here. No running account of the economic changes that carried one generation from immigrant neighborhoods and modest occupations toward property, cars, better clothes and, eventually, descendants growing up thousands of miles away in California.
What survived instead were the surfaces. Photographs. Clothes. Houses. Cars. Jewelry.
A horseshoe can mean luck.
Gambling. Horses.
It can mean nothing: I liked this pin.
I don’t know what it meant to my grandfather.
But I know he chose to wear it for the photograph.
And I know I did not see it until I began looking at these pictures differently.
The archive had not hidden the pin from me.
It had been sitting in plain sight.
I just had not yet learned to look for that unexplained something in the picture.
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.