Ancestry
Filice's father, the elder Francis Filice, descended, on his father's side, from a tribe of shepherds in what is now the Calabria province of Southern Italy. Filice theorizes that his father's family were Jews who took refuge in Southern Italy after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Filice's grandmothers were Rafaella Fortino and Nicolina Pascuzzi, both of whose families descended from the mountain peoples of Celtic descent in Southern Italy. These tribes descend from the Boii, a Celtic people that specialized in cattle raising and filled up the Apennines in Roman times.
The name "Filice" is theorized to be either a form of the word for "fern" in the Southern Italian dialect (in which case, the accent should be on the first 'i') or a corruption of the Latin word for "happy", which is "felix". Both Filice and Joseph G. Fucilla, in his book Our Italian Surnames, support the latter theory.
The Filice Family, into which Fr. Filice would be born, went to the United States from Rogliano, a small town near Cosenza in Calabria. After spending some time in Washington State, they settled in Gilroy and Hollister, agriculturally-oriented cities south of San Francisco, near San Jose. In Gilroy and Hollister, they owned various types of orchards.
Read more about this topic: Francis P. Filice
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