Joseph & Adelaide Mazza Galli
Joseph (1874 – 1935) was a candymaker in the early decades of 20th Century Chicago. He was from Italy, and Adelaide (1874 – 1939) was born in Chicago to Italian immigrant parents.
They married in 1894 and seem to have been partners in business as well as in life. In 1899, according to her obituary, the couple “perfected a process that led to the commercial manufacture and sale of salted peanuts.”
In 1900, 2 of Adelaide’s sisters and her widowed mother were living with them; by 1910, only her sister Louise was. Mary had married, and I suspect her mother had passed away though I couldn’t find any record of that. It’s possible she instead went back to Italy or that she and her late husband were buried elsewhere.
Joseph died at the couple’s summer home in Eagle River, Wisconsin, in 1935, and at that time, Adelaide took over as president of their company, Peanut Specialty. She ran it for four more years before she too passed away. They did not have any children together but two of her sisters (Mary and Margaret) did have children.
Mary’s husband Columbo Repetto, worked at the candy company, so it’s likely it stayed in the family after Adelaide’s death. I did find an ad that ran in Automatic Age magazine in 1943, so it was still a going concern then. Mary is buried at Calvary but elsewhere with her husband, not in the mausoleum.
The oldest Mazza sister, Margaret, had married in 1891, but she is entombed in the Galli mausoleum while her husband Michael who died in 1929 is buried elsewhere in the cemetery. It appears he died before the mausoleum was erected.
Baby sister Louise never married and outlived all her sisters, reaching the great old age of 95 before joining Adelaide and Margaret in the mausoleum.
RIP Joseph and Mazza sisters
Please visit my Instagram for any questions or comments on this post!