Whenever you learn about your ancestors, she says, it gives you a better appreciation, a better sense of self.

She hopes even non-Italians will be inspired by this year's Ferragosto, which is the third annual event. Thirty years ago, Alex Hailey's "Roots" sent many people searching for their own family's stories, Milner says. She hopes the historical displays this Saturday will be similarly inspiring.

Milner's grandfather on her mother's side, Antonio Furano, came from a small village called Savauto, to work in the mines of Carbon County. It was 1913 and he was 17 years old. He eventually found work in Salt Lake City as a chicken butcher for Hotel Utah. When he was 28, an older Italian woman played matchmaker, and he married Matilda Marani, whose parents were also from Italy and who was 15 at the time. By the 1960s, when Furano retired from the Hotel Utah he was the sauce and soup chef and had cooked for several U.S. presidents.

From the late 1880s through the early 1930s, more than 30 million people immigrated to the United States. Four and a half million of those were Italians, and the vast majority of Italians came before 1921, when new immigration laws set strict limits on the numbers that would be accepted from Eastern Europe.

In 1921, Milner says, there was a backlash against Italian immigrants. It reminds her of the kind of backlash we see against today's Mexican immigrants, who come to do the dirty work and the hard work.

Her Italian grandfather had been a farmer, not a miner, Milner says. He knew how to raise olives and oranges and vegetables. He knew how to butcher chickens and make cheese and wine. Yet he and his father and brothers found their first jobs in the mines, and it was exhausting and dangerous work.

The Motta family story is similar, says Elma Motta Uzelac. Her father, Stefano Cesare Motta, was born in 1888 in the Piedmont area of Italy, in the small farming community of Silvano D'Orba. He came to Utah at the age of 17, to live in Bingham Canyon and work for Utah Copper. Soon he began to go by the name of Steve.

Uzelac's brother, Dominick Motta, says their father was one of nine children. "They were sharecropping for the guy who owned the castle." Steve and his brother, John, knew that America needed workers, and so they came. For five years the Motta brothers worked double shifts in the mines — and then they bought their first farm in Union.