Thank you all for your replies. Mugliere does sound right to me, but as you say, my experience is in hearing it pronounced, not written.

The context of the word was a ships passenger list. I noticed that the wives' first names were all "Maglia" (that's what the handwritten word looked like) Then I ...

I looked up "wife" in an online eng->italian dictionary and it gave me the word "moglie". This doesn't look right to me - my mom's family spoke Italian (Sicilian) and I've picked up some, but I've never heard an Italian word end in "ie".

Thank you,
Deidre