Chasing ghosts: Who were these people?

A relative bestowed upon me a treasure of family photographs that had been tucked away for decades. Our extended family has deep roots in the emigration of Italian men and women to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — to New York City, to Boston and to small towns in Massachusetts. The family tree has several branches, some quite familiar, some still mysterious. Our research did not go far into the extended family — that is, the second cousins, who they married, and the children they produced. The immediate family has always been tight, but we had less contact with those in the outer orbits.
While I found many familiar faces among the trove of photos given to me — aunts and uncles, my parents when they were young — I can’t identify a single person, save one, you see on this post.

So, naturally, I wonder who they were, and whether they spoke with Italian accents, and what they did to earn a living, and what they talked about when they gathered. I wonder if they had telephones. I wonder if the men smoked. I wonder how they shaved. I wonder if the women made their own dresses. I wonder what the clothes of the day felt like — the men’s shirts, their Sunday suits.

I assume most were born in Italy and emigrated here, arriving in Boston Harbor or Ellis Island. Many of them appear in formal studio photographs — wedding photos, high school portraits. Many were related to my mother and her siblings, but how? I don’t know.

And it’s not like they are going to see this post and come forward. These people are gone. I can’t imagine that anyone, except for those who were children at the time, could still be alive today. I wonder who they were. I wish the collector of these photos had written something on the back of each — a name, a year.

Thirty-six years ago I went to the old country — Portugal, not Italy — to try and locate relatives on my father’s side of the family. I wanted to find the house where he and his parents had resided before they emigrated to America. I had limited information. I came close, landing on the street where they’d lived, but I was unable to confirm exactly which stuccoed house had been theirs. A woman who helped me in the quest expressed sympathy for my failure to locate relatives or find my father’s birthplace. “You are chasing ghosts,” she said, wrapping me in the kind of comforting melancholy one gets from a fadista. I had come close to the origin of my family, on my father’s side — close enough to feel a connection. I feel the same now as I look at these old, precious photographs from my mother’s side; some, if not most, were people she knew and probably loved, and that’s enough for me.