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.
Getting answers I wasn't looking for
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.
No Museum-Quality Scans For Me
I needed to properly scan my grandmother’s old photograph albums to do them justice. It was a project to do before I could do much else with them.
High resolution. Careful handling, white gloves, even! Useful, consistent file names. The whole museum-quality project.
I never did it.
What actually unlocked the albums was my iPhone.
I started taking quick photographs of the pages. Nothing fancy. In a bright diffusely lit room, I tried to steady the phone at a 90 degree angle to the prints.
Once the pictures were in iPhoto, I could enlarge them, crop individual faces, reorder them, compare photographs from different albums and use iPhoto’s facial recognition to suggest possible matches. © 2026 Anastasia Ashman
Suddenly I was looking at the pictures all the time.
That mattered.
As my genealogy research moved farther back — eventually eight or ten generations in some branches — the photographs and the family tree began working together. A name in a record could lead me back to a face. A face I had seen in my lifetime occurred repeatedly through history.
I began attaching identified photographs to people in the tree and getting much more familiar with who belonged to whom.
The proper scanning project still exists somewhere in my future.