My 5th Great-Uncle Died In The Duke’s Licorice Factory

A death record from Calabria connects my relative, a duke, and a black candy that somehow made it to the Smithsonian…

Nobody in my family ever told me a story about Francesco. I had heard the name Salerno from my grandfather. They were legendary, those Salernos. What did he tell me? I cannot recall a thing.

Francesco Salerno’s death record in the National Archives of Cosenza

But I know where Francesco died.

He spent his last day in a licorice workshop belonging to the Duke of Corigliano.

On January 5, 1817, Francesco was sixty years old and working as a laborer when he died in the concio della liquirizia, the Duke’s licorice-processing workshop in Calabria.

Naturally, I stopped researching Francesco and started researching licorice.

My sisters and I were licorice fiends so I’m not a newcomer to licorice. No one ever connected our fixation on this candy to a family story. The duke was news.

It turns out this was not some eccentric duke making candy in his kitchen. A century earlier, the Duke of Corigliano had established one of Calabria’s earliest conci, helping turn the wild licorice root there into a regional industry.

Duca di Corigliano Licorice Sticks, at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. These date to about 1885, nearly seventy years after Francesco died in the Duke of Corigliano’s licorice workshop.

And then I found this exhibit at the Smithsonian: Duca di Corigliano Licorice Sticks.

These sticks were made seven decades after Francesco died, carrying the same Corigliano name into the American historical record.

I have no story about Francesco. But I know where he spent his final day. I know what factory he died in and what they did there: crushing, boiling, extracting sweet black liquid from roots.

And I now know exactly where in Calabria I need to go.

Getting answers I wasn’t looking for, Summer 2026

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!

Back to the Archive: Summer 2026 by Anastasia Ashman

NOTES FROM AN ANTIMEMOIR

Read on Substack

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

No, I said, I got answers that led to new questions.

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.

But the fast, dirty version is what got the research moving.

My Cousin Married A Rodeo Queen

History waits for the person who cares.

Finally, a couple years ago, I looked at my own family.

I never knew we are part of living California history.

…or that we’re in the Library of Congress (LOC)? I stumbled on cousins with a place in its American Folklife Center.

Geneaology work had led me back to a Calabrian mountain village in 1803, to a branch of my tree that eventually grew to sit thousands of miles away, right in my grandparent’s back yard.

Not the back porch in Little Italy.

Instead this cold trail led from my grandfather’s grandfather’s brother and took me down to around Gilroy, that place with the Garlic Festival. Down to the tiny hamlet of San Martin, on an agricultural stretch of the old Camino Real that once connected Spanish missions running the length of the state. Just south of my grandparents' place in the valley of San Jose. 

Helen married my fourth cousin Tony, whose Filice surname rings a distant bell.

Outside of FILICE'S WESTERN STORE from The Library of Congress, photographed by Ken Light in 1989.

Black and white photographs in the Italian Americans in the West Project collection at the LOC show the outside of FILICE'S WESTERN STORE. The sign is decorated with a saddle on one side and a boot on the other. A big brown fiberglass horse stands under the sign, beckoning drivers in.

Elaine and her western world was not part of my family identity. We were not horsey people.

I imagine we had unknowingly driven past her and Tony’s 40-year old business, known as “a real rancher’s place” selling tack and apparel. Helen Elaine Martin Filice may be new to me but she belongs to California history.

Helen Elaine Martin Filice, Miss Grand National 1965. From her obituary.

A homecoming queen and a cheerleader, Helen became Miss Grand National 1965 at the Cow Palace, and a Sweetheart at the Salinas Rodeo, her recent obituary shares. She is pictured standing with her tall, dark horse. A tailored light-colored suit and wide-brimmed hat, gloved hand resting at the bridle, her face tilted to look her beloved horse in the eye. A whitewashed paddock fence recedes into oak-dotted hills. 

Her death notice explains she married my cousin Tony at Mission San Juan Bautista, the same site from Hitchcock's film Vertigo where Kim Novak's character fell to her death from the bell tower.

Google Street View tells me the horse statue is still there, painted stark white. The store is a Boot Barn now.

Before Helen was crowned Rodeo Queen another local highschooler, in chaps and cowboy boots, won the title at the Cow Palace. She would go on to become a supervisor, a mayor, and a U.S. senator. (Image from CowPalace.com)

The Cow Palace is familiar to me, but not as a rodeo venue. As a teenager I blew up balloons for a Rolling Stones concert there.

Helen’s fiberglass horse outlasted the family members who put it there. We’re lucky it kept marking that stretch of western road. Now I know we are horsey people after all.

Father, Mother + Boss Arrigo

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.