Heirloom Heritage Co. began the way all meaningful things begin — with a question asked too late, and a determination to answer it before the last person who knew was gone.
In early 2026, I set out to produce a Mother's Day gift for my mother Patricia — a woman whose family came from a village called Apecchio in the Marche Apennines, from sharecroppers who left Italy in the early 1900s and built their lives on Chicago's northwest side.
I had an AncestryDNA kit. I had a GEDCOM export from years of casual genealogy. I had fragments — dates, ship names, a census record here and there. What I did not have was a story.
Fourteen weeks later, I delivered Le Nostre Radici — a 14,000-word typeset book that my mother held in her hands and wept over. Three weeks after that, I delivered the companion volume for Father's Day: Skrzydła nad Polską, the story of a Kashubian family who arrived in America in 1880 and a grandfather who flew radar on B-29s over the Pacific and never fully spoke of it.
Two heirloom volumes have been commissioned and delivered to real family members. Both are available for review by prospective clients.
Those two books are the reason Heirloom Heritage Co. exists.
"She held it and couldn't speak for a moment. Then she said: where did you find all of this?"
— Patricia Borghi-Formell, on receiving Le Nostre Radici, Mother's Day 2026
Every project begins with your AncestryDNA results — not as a decoration, but as the scientific spine of the entire narrative. Ethnicity percentages, haplogroups, ThruLines connections, and cousin matches all become chapters, not footnotes.
Italian civil records via Antenati. Polish and Kashubian church records from Gdańsk Pomerania. NARA military files. Ship manifests. Chicago parish records. U.S. census archives. Not a database search — genuine primary-source archival work.
Every commissioned volume is written as a book. Your ancestors are characters. The world they came from is rendered in historical context. The voice is warm, specific, and built to last — not a database printout and not a template-generated summary.
Greater Chicago is home to approximately 573,000 Italian-Americans — the third-largest concentration in the United States — and 930,000 Polish-Americans, one of the largest Polish communities outside Warsaw. Chicago's Irish-American community adds another 200,000–250,000.
The founder is himself an Italian-American and Polish-American Chicagoan. This is not a vendor relationship with these communities. It is insider credibility — the knowledge of exactly which records to look for, which villages to search, and which questions to ask of a family that has never been asked them before.
Tell us about your family and what you're hoping to discover. We'll respond within two business days.