Latest / Stories That Live In Us / The Countess of Cons: Uncovering Scandalous Ancestors (with Deborah Holman) | Episode 133

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The Countess of Cons: Uncovering Scandalous Ancestors (with Deborah Holman) | Episode 133 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Have you ever stumbled across an ancestor in your family tree who made you stop and ask, who were you really?
• 0:06
  Crista Cowan: Some of us grow up with sanitized versions of our family history.
• 0:11
  Crista Cowan: Until a single clue changes everything.
• 0:14
  Crista Cowan: For my guest today, author Deborah Holman, that clue was a piece of yellowed paper physically taped over a portrait in an old family book.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: When Deborah started peeling back those layers, she didn't just find a missing record, she uncovered a 19th-century relative living under a dozen aliases, pulling off high-stakes cons, and defying every expectation of womanhood in her era.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: Together, Deborah and I are going to explore how the messy unpolished truths about our ancestors give us a far richer, more honest view of where we come from.
• 0:47
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Deborah Holman.
• 0:50
  Crista Cowan: Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family.
• 0:59
  Crista Cowan: Welcome to Stories That Live In Up.
• 1:01
  Crista Cowan: Well, Deborah, thank you so much for coming.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm really excited that you have um like taken this story and run with it.
• 1:13
  Crista Cowan: And you've got a book coming out, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes.
• 1:17
  Crista Cowan: But I would just love to start back all the way at the beginning for you.
• 1:21
  Crista Cowan: Uh were you raised in a family that family history was something that was important?
• 1:27
  Crista Cowan: Was there stories told, or was that something that was kind of just always tucked under wraps?
• 1:31
  Deborah Holman: I would say that we didn't really call it family history, but there were always stories, you know, mostly ridiculous stories, but there were always there were always stories, and you know, um, but not the important stories.
• 1:47
  Deborah Holman: What do you mean by that?
• 1:48
  Deborah Holman: Both my parents are Jewish, they're divorced, they divorced when I was young.
• 1:52
  Deborah Holman: Um, and my mom and uh her mom and grandmother, they fled Vienna in 1938.
• 2:00
  Deborah Holman: No, and my grandfather was in a concentration two concentration camps, actually.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: Nobody talked about that, but everything else we talked about.
• 2:08
  Crista Cowan: Well, and I imagine those traumatic experiences for a lot of people, they just wanted to leave them behind them, yeah.
• 2:14
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:15
  Crista Cowan: So, um, so did your parents immigrate together or separately?
• 2:21
  Deborah Holman: No, my mom's uh family was the family in Europe, and they came in uh 1938.
• 2:27
  Deborah Holman: My grandfather got out of the concentration camp at 39.
• 2:30
  Deborah Holman: My dad's family has been here since 1859.
• 2:34
  Deborah Holman: Wow, okay.
• 2:36
  Crista Cowan: And where so your mom's family was from Austria?
• 2:39
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and then your dad's family was from where?
• 2:44
  Deborah Holman: Uh London.
• 2:45
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 2:45
  Deborah Holman: They settled first in Hoboken and then Brooklyn.
• 2:50
  Deborah Holman: Okay, and then how did your parents meet?
• 2:52
  Deborah Holman: They lived next door to each other.
• 2:54
  Deborah Holman: Stop it.
• 2:55
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, seriously.
• 2:57
  Deborah Holman: Um my um my dad's family moved from Brooklyn to New Rochelle in the 50s, early 50s.
• 3:08
  Deborah Holman: And my mom, of course, uh, they came in 38, and it was my uncle, my uncle managed the apartment house.
• 3:15
  Deborah Holman: And so when they needed a place to go, he sponsored them.
• 3:19
  Deborah Holman: So that's where they came to this apartment house in New Rochelle.
• 3:24
  Deborah Holman: And my grandmother lived there until she died in 1972.
• 3:27
  Deborah Holman: Wow.
• 3:28
  Deborah Holman: So did you know all four of your grandparents?
• 3:31
  Deborah Holman: Oh, yes, it was quite a thing because they lived across then then my father's uh parents needed a smaller apartment, so they moved across the hall.
• 3:39
  Deborah Holman: So growing up, all four of my grandparents lived across the hall from each other.
• 3:45
  Deborah Holman: What presented its own set of challenges?
• 3:48
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 3:49
  Deborah Holman: I remember my mother sneaking, trying to sneak us into her mother's house apartment because she didn't want the other grandmother to know we were there.
• 3:57
  Deborah Holman: And there were five of us, so it was hard to sneak.
• 4:00
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I bet.
• 4:01
  Crista Cowan: But how fun to grow up in that environment as a child, I suspect, with adults all around that maybe doted on you a little bit or at least had interesting stories.
• 4:13
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, yeah, great stories.
• 4:15
  Deborah Holman: And and as I got older, I found that the stories were even more interesting than I even imagined.
• 4:22
  Crista Cowan: So as you got older, like what was it that sparked your your interest in actually pursuing family history as a hobby?
• 4:29
  Deborah Holman: My father told us we were the black Irish, which I don't I never even looked it up to see what that was.
• 4:35
  Deborah Holman: Um, and I was very proud of being Irish.
• 4:38
  Deborah Holman: And I loved St.
• 4:40
  Deborah Holman: Patrick's Day and all of this.
• 4:41
  Deborah Holman: And uh by 2007, my dad had pancreatic cancer and it wasn't looking good.
• 4:47
  Deborah Holman: So I decided I wanted to find out once and for all the if he was right.
• 4:53
  Deborah Holman: And I remember going, he lived in Toronto by then.
• 4:57
  Deborah Holman: I remember going to see him in hospice, and I said, you know, Dad, the only, and oh, he said that um we were the black Irish and Barney the Red was our ancestor.
• 5:07
  Deborah Holman: That sounds very Irish plausible, right?
• 5:10
  Deborah Holman: So I said, Dad, you know, the the only ancestor named Barney I can find is your grandfather, and he was born in Brooklyn.
• 5:19
  Deborah Holman: I don't think we're Irish.
• 5:22
  Deborah Holman: And he said, Oh, maybe I'm wrong.
• 5:25
  Deborah Holman: Oh maybe goes, maybe we're Scottish.
• 5:30
  Deborah Holman: Well, we are not, thank you, Ancestry DNA.
• 5:34
  Deborah Holman: Um, not a drop of Irish, Scottish, or anything like that.
• 5:38
  Deborah Holman: But that was when I started my genealogy in 2007, and that's what got me started.
• 5:45
  Crista Cowan: That is so fun.
• 5:46
  Crista Cowan: So, where did your dad's family end up taking you?
• 5:49
  Deborah Holman: Well, they uh I traced him back, his family back as far as London, um 1720, 1795, which is pretty decent for Jews.
• 6:00
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 6:01
  Deborah Holman: Um, but I figured, you know, they all got kicked out in the 1400s, so I knew they had to come from somewhere.
• 6:06
  Deborah Holman: I I haven't really delved into it because I got distracted by writing, um, but I'm thinking that his father's family came from Germany, and his mother's family definitely came from Germany.
• 6:20
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 6:20
  Crista Cowan: So so you got interested for your into your own family history because of the stories and stuff from your dad.
• 6:28
  Crista Cowan: When did you decide to start pursuing your husband's family tree?
• 6:32
  Deborah Holman: My husband's uh father, Bill Holman, wrote a family history book uh in night and gave it to everybody as a Christmas present in 1976.
• 6:43
  Deborah Holman: You know, it was one of those hand-typed, printed at the print shop, spiral bound kind of things.
• 6:50
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 6:50
  Deborah Holman: And it was falling, so by the 2000s, it was really falling apart.
• 6:55
  Deborah Holman: So my sister-in-law and I decided to rework it and publish it as a hardcover version for everybody in the family.
• 7:04
  Deborah Holman: And that was in 2015.
• 7:06
  Deborah Holman: And so that is when I first started learning more about my husband's family.
• 7:13
  Crista Cowan: Did his dad like just present the information or did it include stories in that original publication?
• 7:20
  Deborah Holman: He wrote, he was a very good writer, and he wrote, you know, really nice like stories.
• 7:25
  Deborah Holman: Not he wrote it sort of as a narrative, but you know, first person narrative.
• 7:31
  Deborah Holman: Um, the only problem was his memory was not very good.
• 7:36
  Deborah Holman: So as I as I'm reading it, I'm like, this doesn't seem right, and that doesn't seem right.
• 7:42
  Deborah Holman: So I decided to kind of check into a couple of things.
• 7:46
  Deborah Holman: And so I started for some I guess I decided to start with his great-grandmother.
• 7:53
  Deborah Holman: Um because there's a picture in a Xerox picture in the front of the family book where she's it's like a family portrait, uh-huh, but you can clearly see that her name has been taped over.
• 8:09
  Deborah Holman: Like somebody had taken a name, taken a piece of paper and taped the name that they referred to her by, Katherine C.
• 8:17
  Deborah Holman: Fitz Allen.
• 8:18
  Deborah Holman: And they taped it over something.
• 8:19
  Deborah Holman: So I'm like, what's up with that?
• 8:21
  Deborah Holman: What's underneath?
• 8:22
  Deborah Holman: What's underneath there?
• 8:24
  Deborah Holman: Right.
• 8:25
  Deborah Holman: And I asked everybody, nobody has the original.
• 8:28
  Deborah Holman: That's the only thing we have.
• 8:30
  Deborah Holman: Interesting.
• 8:31
  Deborah Holman: So I decided to do a little digging, and I went on the you know, message boards back then were a lot more active.
• 8:40
  Deborah Holman: So I this article was posted on an ancestry message board that talked about this woman, Katherine Seely, who was married to William Seely, who was just going through a divorce and she was looking for more alimony, and she had two children, one named Ida.
• 8:59
  Deborah Holman: And I'm like, these names sound super familiar.
• 9:02
  Deborah Holman: And so I kind of cross-referenced it, and I realized that that was my husband's great-grandmother.
• 9:08
  Deborah Holman: In the article, it said that she had kidnapped the other daughter.
• 9:14
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 9:14
  Deborah Holman: I'm like, there's a story here.
• 9:17
  Deborah Holman: So one article became 10 articles, became a hundred articles, and I lost the next two years of my life.
• 9:27
  Crista Cowan: So, Catherine, um, you you find this mysterious photo with the piece of paper over it, then you find a message board with some something intriguing, and then did you dive into the newspaper research yourself, or was it just finding you somehow?
• 9:43
  Deborah Holman: I just went on to all the newspaper sites I could think of.
• 9:46
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 9:47
  Deborah Holman: And got, and the more articles I found, the more confused I was, because there were articles about Katherine Seeley and William Seely.
• 9:58
  Deborah Holman: Then there were cat articles about Carolyn Johns being married to William Seely, and then there was this other person, and then another name, and then and then uh Kenna also connected to Kansas City and William Sealy.
• 10:14
  Deborah Holman: I was like, what is happening here?
• 10:16
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, as it turns out, it was all my husband's great-grandmother doing everything, and she just had a tons of aliases.
• 10:24
  Crista Cowan: Oh goodness.
• 10:25
  Crista Cowan: So, how did you like I want to get to the actual story of her because I'm super fascinated?
• 10:32
  Crista Cowan: I like I've heard you tell the story once before, and I just love it.
• 10:36
  Crista Cowan: But how did you ultimately start to put the pieces together that you really were dealing with the same person?
• 10:43
  Crista Cowan: And that and then how did you organize the story so that it made sense?
• 10:48
  Deborah Holman: Well, it was a mess because I had all of these newspaper articles with different names and different places, and we're spanning like uh 1889 to she stopped, she she she went straight in about 1907, I'd say.
• 11:06
  Deborah Holman: So, you know, 20 years at least of you know, a lot of activity.
• 11:10
  Deborah Holman: And honestly, um, I don't know if um you or your listeners are familiar with the late Ron Ahrens, uh-huh, the prominent Ron, actually, probably at the same conference.
• 11:21
  Deborah Holman: Um, Ron had written a book called Mind Maps.
• 11:27
  Crista Cowan: Uh-huh.
• 11:28
  Deborah Holman: And I and I used that along with Excel spreadsheets to untangle everything.
• 11:34
  Deborah Holman: Oh goodness.
• 11:36
  Deborah Holman: And there was otherwise, there was no way to figure it out.
• 11:39
  Deborah Holman: And you said it took you about two years?
• 11:41
  Deborah Holman: It took me, well, I researched for about two years, and then it took me another year to to put it, you know, into narrative form.
• 11:49
  Deborah Holman: Oh my goodness.
• 11:51
  Crista Cowan: Oh, so tell us the story.
• 11:52
  Crista Cowan: Like, like if you start at the beginning of Catherine's life, what what is the story of her?
• 11:58
  Deborah Holman: Unfortunately, Catherine is the genealogist's nightmare.
• 12:03
  Deborah Holman: She has, I have yet to find a birth record for her, despite almost 10 years of looking.
• 12:10
  Deborah Holman: Um, and because she was less than honest, you know, some censuses say she was born in Ireland, some say New York.
• 12:17
  Deborah Holman: But, you know, that you never know.
• 12:20
  Deborah Holman: Um so from what I could piece together, uh she definitely was in Albany, New York with a family of 12, 11 or 12 siblings in 1855.
• 12:34
  Deborah Holman: By 1860, she married and she she married William Seely, who came from Connecticut.
• 12:41
  Deborah Holman: And he was a pretty up-and-coming uh they called him drovers.
• 12:47
  Deborah Holman: The job was to move cattle from one place to another.
• 12:51
  Deborah Holman: Um, and somehow in Albany, he hooked up with Gus Swift, which is now um Swift and Company, the sausage sausage people.
• 13:00
  Deborah Holman: Gus offered him a job, and so William started to become pretty wealthy.
• 13:07
  Deborah Holman: Somewhere rather quickly, Catherine married him.
• 13:11
  Deborah Holman: The next thing you know, they're in backwoods, Kansas in 1861, and she's miserable.
• 13:18
  Deborah Holman: Well, Kansas City is a place for cattle drovers, right?
• 13:22
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 13:23
  Deborah Holman: Uh she has a daughter by then, Ida, her first daughter.
• 13:28
  Deborah Holman: Um, and she's just miserable.
• 13:31
  Deborah Holman: And according to the divorce, you know, the papers back then were phenomenal.
• 13:35
  Deborah Holman: So, I mean, they listed everything.
• 13:37
  Deborah Holman: They'd be so sued now.
• 13:39
  Deborah Holman: Um, she was she would just berate him constantly to move.
• 13:46
  Deborah Holman: So they went from this backwoods Kansas, like log cabin, and he finally agrees to move her to Kansas City.
• 13:53
  Deborah Holman: Within two years, they have this beautiful three-story home in Kansas City.
• 13:59
  Deborah Holman: I think they built it in 1887 or 1886, 1871, I'm sorry.
• 14:05
  Deborah Holman: Uh, beautiful home, and she's uh moving in high society in Kansas City, and she's thrilled.
• 14:11
  Deborah Holman: This is that's her goal, right?
• 14:13
  Deborah Holman: Is to be seen as a high society person.
• 14:17
  Deborah Holman: And um then the uh by by 1888, William has had enough.
• 14:25
  Deborah Holman: They're about 50 years old, each one of them.
• 14:28
  Deborah Holman: The girls are more or less grown, and so he sues her for divorce.
• 14:33
  Deborah Holman: She countersues, loses, and then kind of flips out.
• 14:41
  Deborah Holman: And the next thing you know, she's moving all around the Midwest committing crimes.
• 14:45
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 14:46
  Deborah Holman: And you know, she was um and and a nice variety too, not just your you know, petty theft.
• 14:53
  Deborah Holman: Um she would she would con, you know, say she was raising money for orphanages, and there of course was no orphanage, so she was lining her own pockets.
• 15:05
  Deborah Holman: Um at one point in one town over a weekend, she broke into 50 homes.
• 15:11
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 15:12
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, she and she was 60 years old.
• 15:15
  Deborah Holman: Oh my goodness.
• 15:16
  Deborah Holman: And then somebody would come home and you know, catch her in the act, and she'd pull the, you know, oh, oh, I'm so this is not my, you know, this isn't my house.
• 15:26
  Deborah Holman: And she would pull the old lady, you know, confused act, and they'd let her go.
• 15:30
  Crista Cowan: Oh my goodness.
• 15:31
  Crista Cowan: And are her like, is she still in the Kansas City area?
• 15:35
  Crista Cowan: Like, are her daughters and their families nearby?
• 15:37
  Crista Cowan: Like, does anybody know what's happening?
• 15:39
  Deborah Holman: It doesn't seem like anyone, well, yes, I should say her daughters do know, but they're not they're kind of um not saying anything.
• 15:48
  Deborah Holman: Ida, her older one, sort of becomes her enabler, I guess, for lack of a better word.
• 15:57
  Deborah Holman: The younger daughter tries to disassociate herself and marries, uh, in Catherine's words, a no-good low-down, dirty fab uh grocery clerk.
• 16:10
  Deborah Holman: And so I kitty gets out and goes on her goes away on her own, but Ida kind of sticks with her.
• 16:16
  Deborah Holman: And then every once in a while, Catherine would get a jail sentence, and Ida would get her out and promise, you know, I'll take care of her.
• 16:25
  Deborah Holman: And it finally they end up back, they end up in Chicago, where they still have connections to Gus Swift.
• 16:32
  Deborah Holman: They have friends there from Albany.
• 16:34
  Deborah Holman: And she ends up in uh in Chicago with Ida, and they open an orphanage, which was rather unfortunate for everybody involved because she really seemed to abuse the children.
• 16:51
  Deborah Holman: So that was an un you know, I mean, to me, that was the worst thing.
• 16:57
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 16:57
  Deborah Holman: You know, you know, hurting kids and and making kids go out and beg for you in snowstorms.
• 17:03
  Deborah Holman: So she had six indictments against her in Chicago, which is where she she spent the rest of her life in the Chicago area.
• 17:11
  Deborah Holman: Wow.
• 17:13
  Crista Cowan: The the like there's so much to this story, and so much you probably still don't know, but as you think about it, like her husband sued her for divorce, which means I suspect she was left without any source of income.
• 17:25
  Crista Cowan: And at 50 years old, she'd raised a family and followed him across the country.
• 17:31
  Crista Cowan: Um, and so I suspect there was maybe some desperation in her behavior, but the fact that she turned so readily to criminal activity, like, was there any hint that there had been any of that in her life previous to that?
• 17:46
  Crista Cowan: No, nothing.
• 17:47
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 17:47
  Deborah Holman: And and you know, you say she had no source of income.
• 17:50
  Deborah Holman: She had income.
• 17:51
  Deborah Holman: Did she?
• 17:52
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 17:53
  Deborah Holman: When he divorced her, um, he had set up, he had sold all kinds of property in Albany and put the money in a trust for her.
• 18:02
  Deborah Holman: So in 1889, she was earning fifteen hundred dollars a month.
• 18:08
  Deborah Holman: That's a lot of money.
• 18:09
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, it is.
• 18:10
  Deborah Holman: So, you know, I at first I was like, oh, you know, poor 50-year-old divorced Catherine.
• 18:17
  Deborah Holman: She, you know, she's gotta find a way to provide for her and her two girls.
• 18:22
  Deborah Holman: But it wasn't about money, I don't think, because she had money.
• 18:26
  Deborah Holman: But you know, for some people, there's a hole and it's never enough.
• 18:31
  Deborah Holman: So I don't know.
• 18:35
  Deborah Holman: And she also was a very independent person.
• 18:39
  Deborah Holman: She didn't want to be beholden to anybody or told what to do.
• 18:42
  Deborah Holman: And there there's not a lot of opportunities in 1889 for a in you know, for a divorced woman.
• 18:49
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 18:49
  Deborah Holman: But I could never, and I still can't after all these years.
• 18:54
  Deborah Holman: She wants to be seen and valued as a high society woman, but she chooses crime.
• 19:02
  Deborah Holman: I just can't reconcile that.
• 19:07
  Crista Cowan: So there's no in all of your research, there's no indication of her motives or her mental state or any of that?
• 19:15
  Deborah Holman: Well, her mental state is another question.
• 19:18
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 19:18
  Deborah Holman: Um, it's very you don't it's very hard to write about people who can't defend themselves, right?
• 19:26
  Deborah Holman: Because you don't know.
• 19:28
  Deborah Holman: But there is definitely mental illness in her family.
• 19:32
  Deborah Holman: Her older sister died in an institution in Utica.
• 19:36
  Deborah Holman: Her nephew killed his wife and ended up in an institution.
• 19:43
  Deborah Holman: Her younger sister had what probably we would now call postpartum and ended up in an institution.
• 19:54
  Deborah Holman: So there was something definitely in the family lines that makes me think that had something to do with it.
• 20:01
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 20:01
  Crista Cowan: And then where does Catherine fall in like the birth order in her family?
• 20:05
  Crista Cowan: You said there were 12 siblings.
• 20:08
  Deborah Holman: She was about five down, I think.
• 20:12
  Deborah Holman: And then there were seven after her, all born in Ireland except except for one.
• 20:17
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so she's a middle middle child of a large family.
• 20:20
  Crista Cowan: She has a husband with a high-profile career that takes them to the middle of nowhere.
• 20:26
  Crista Cowan: She raises these two girls, and once they're raised, she's just kind of done living everybody else's life, it sounds like.
• 20:34
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:34
  Deborah Holman: And she also had some sad losses, too.
• 20:36
  Deborah Holman: She lost two children in between Ida and Catherine.
• 20:40
  Deborah Holman: One one died very young, like six months in Connecticut, and the other in Albany at about age 10.
• 20:48
  Deborah Holman: So I'm sure that was difficult too.
• 20:51
  Crista Cowan: Oh, yeah.
• 20:51
  Crista Cowan: Those are that's very traumatic for a mother, especially.
• 20:54
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 20:54
  Crista Cowan: So she ends up in Chicago, starts this orphanage with her daughter.
• 21:00
  Crista Cowan: Um, and but for all intents and purposes, the orphanage is a front for her to continue different forms of criminal activity.
• 21:10
  Crista Cowan: Exactly.
• 21:11
  Crista Cowan: And is that where she stays then till she dies?
• 21:14
  Deborah Holman: No.
• 21:15
  Deborah Holman: They she had these six indictments hanging over her, and they basically said, get out of town, keep your keep your nose clean, and we're not going to throw you in jail.
• 21:26
  Deborah Holman: Because at that point, it was not jail, it would be penitentiary, you know, with that.
• 21:31
  Deborah Holman: So she decided to go on a several-week road trip, which I documented in the book because it was just so fascinating.
• 21:40
  Deborah Holman: And she went around like Lawrence, Kansas, and you know, all of these places.
• 21:46
  Deborah Holman: Uh she went, she went to Indiana, um, other places in Illinois.
• 21:52
  Deborah Holman: I think she went to Nebraska on the same trip.
• 21:55
  Deborah Holman: And everywhere she went, she traveled for free because she had calling cards.
• 21:59
  Deborah Holman: And said she was Mrs.
• 22:01
  Deborah Holman: So and so representing such and such charity, and they would give her a free rail pass.
• 22:06
  Deborah Holman: The thing she did mistakenly was she wrote it all down.
• 22:12
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 22:14
  Deborah Holman: This story just gets weirder and weirder.
• 22:17
  Deborah Holman: You could not make this up if you tried.
• 22:20
  Deborah Holman: She is documenting her.
• 22:23
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, like in a little accounting book.
• 22:25
  Deborah Holman: She had two of them.
• 22:26
  Deborah Holman: And and she would she would always write the first couple of entries to make it look legit, because nobody ever wants to donate if no one's donated before.
• 22:36
  Deborah Holman: So she would always, you know, add in, you know, some the first couple.
• 22:41
  Deborah Holman: Um and then she'd write down everything that she made wherever she went.
• 22:45
  Deborah Holman: And uh when she ended up back, after a while, she was just getting tired.
• 22:49
  Deborah Holman: She ended up back in Chicago.
• 22:51
  Deborah Holman: Um, oh, after she attempted to burn her house down for insurance.
• 22:55
  Deborah Holman: I forgot that.
• 22:56
  Deborah Holman: When she was in Indiana, she rented a house and then disappeared for three days during which the house burned down, surprisingly.
• 23:06
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 23:07
  Deborah Holman: And then when she went back, they uh to collect the insurance, they told her that it seemed very suspicious and they weren't going to pay off.
• 23:18
  Deborah Holman: So she got mad, and that's why she went back to Chicago.
• 23:21
  Deborah Holman: Wow.
• 23:21
  Deborah Holman: And how old is she by this time?
• 23:23
  Deborah Holman: Um I think she was probably in her mid-sixties by then.
• 23:28
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 23:28
  Deborah Holman: So when she got back to Chicago, she did something else stupid.
• 23:33
  Deborah Holman: Um, she tried to steal something from a department store and she got caught.
• 23:37
  Deborah Holman: And while she was in jail there, the people from South Bend, um the insurance company found out where she was in jail and they went and got her.
• 23:48
  Deborah Holman: So then they reinstated all the uh indictments.
• 23:52
  Deborah Holman: But she found a lawyer.
• 23:54
  Deborah Holman: She kept finding lawyers that would represent her because one, you know, she'd get one and they'd quit because they couldn't take it anymore, and then she'd get another and he'd quit.
• 24:01
  Deborah Holman: Um, but she got found a lawyer that got all the indictments um squash washed, I guess is the word.
• 24:08
  Deborah Holman: And she went free and clear.
• 24:11
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 24:12
  Crista Cowan: So it's interesting.
• 24:13
  Crista Cowan: Like, I mean, she's this woman in her 60s in the 1890s.
• 24:17
  Crista Cowan: She has money, but continues to live this life of crime.
• 24:23
  Crista Cowan: Was she particularly beautiful or was she paying?
• 24:27
  Crista Cowan: Like, were the lawyers just in it for the money?
• 24:29
  Crista Cowan: Or why do you think people kept why do you think people kept giving her money?
• 24:34
  Deborah Holman: I think she was very, very savvy, very, very smart.
• 24:38
  Deborah Holman: And she could she knew the right things to say, and she knew how to, I think she was really good at knowing, like a con man, a confidence person would be, really good at reading people.
• 24:49
  Deborah Holman: Um, but she was absolutely no beauty.
• 24:53
  Deborah Holman: Uh, one of the newspaper articles said she had a mustache that any gentleman would would uh wish for.
• 25:02
  Deborah Holman: That's terrible.
• 25:06
  Deborah Holman: Not much of a looker there.
• 25:07
  Deborah Holman: She had a way of charming people.
• 25:12
  Crista Cowan: Sounds like it.
• 25:12
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 25:13
  Crista Cowan: So what then she gets off this time again?
• 25:16
  Crista Cowan: Like, what does the end of her life look like?
• 25:20
  Deborah Holman: So she finds another guy.
• 25:23
  Deborah Holman: She's 73.
• 25:25
  Deborah Holman: She finds this farmer who has a farm in rural Kansas, and she thinks that he's, you know, got he has like three farms, loads of property.
• 25:34
  Deborah Holman: So she marries him.
• 25:36
  Deborah Holman: The marriage lasted barely six months.
• 25:41
  Deborah Holman: Um, so she got uh it was another sensational divorce case there.
• 25:46
  Deborah Holman: They got divorced in 1907.
• 25:48
  Deborah Holman: She divorced him because she realized she wasn't getting any of his money.
• 25:51
  Deborah Holman: Um, so she divorced him, went back to Chicago, and then, you know, I don't I don't know whether, you know, when you get to the end of your life, you're sort of looking at things differently, and maybe you want to do some good.
• 26:10
  Deborah Holman: Um, by then, her youngest daughter, Catherine, was married to a man named John Holman, who is my husband's grandfather.
• 26:19
  Deborah Holman: And she actually had, of course, quite a bit of money by now.
• 26:25
  Deborah Holman: Um, so she gave him money to finance a six-apartment building in Chicago, right on Lakeshore Drive, which um is a pretty swanky place.
• 26:37
  Deborah Holman: She gave him the money to build this apartment building.
• 26:41
  Deborah Holman: Kitty, her daughter, and his nickname was Jack.
• 26:45
  Deborah Holman: Kitty and Jack lived in the apartment building.
• 26:48
  Deborah Holman: And then she decided to buy a farm in Glenville, Illinois, which is right, you know, next door.
• 26:53
  Deborah Holman: And she and Ida lived out, uh, Catherine lived the rest of her life, which was five more years, on this farm in Glenview.
• 27:01
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 27:01
  Crista Cowan: For being so unhappy for living in the middle of nowhere, Kansas.
• 27:05
  Crista Cowan: She had no problem living in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, at the end of her life, huh?
• 27:08
  Crista Cowan: I get well, yeah, yeah.
• 27:10
  Deborah Holman: She was pretty unhealthy, I think.
• 27:12
  Deborah Holman: Um, also.
• 27:13
  Deborah Holman: She was she was quite the drinker.
• 27:15
  Deborah Holman: So I think she had a lot of health issues.
• 27:18
  Deborah Holman: So um, I don't think she was moving very well by then.
• 27:22
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow.
• 27:23
  Crista Cowan: So here's my here's my question to you.
• 27:25
  Crista Cowan: As you were unraveling this story over the years, were you sharing this information with your husband about it's his great-grandmother, yeah?
• 27:33
  Crista Cowan: Great-grandmother, yeah.
• 27:35
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 27:35
  Crista Cowan: His great grandma.
• 27:36
  Crista Cowan: So as you're as you're are you sharing things as you uncover them with him, or are you waiting until you figured it out?
• 27:43
  Deborah Holman: Oh, I'm sharing them with him.
• 27:45
  Deborah Holman: Um, my my husband comes from a family with he had five uh six siblings, but sadly, by 20, by the time I was doing the story, there was just him and his sister left.
• 27:57
  Deborah Holman: His sister's about 16 years older than him.
• 28:01
  Deborah Holman: Um, and so Scott's thinking the whole thing is, you know, this is hilarious, and he can't believe it, and he thinks it's great.
• 28:07
  Deborah Holman: His sister did not think so.
• 28:09
  Deborah Holman: Oh no.
• 28:10
  Deborah Holman: Okay.
• 28:11
  Deborah Holman: When I told her, you know, what I found, this was uh in 2018.
• 28:17
  Deborah Holman: When I told her what I found and that I wanted to write a book about it, she was not happy at all.
• 28:24
  Deborah Holman: And I said, Well, I really think this is a story that needs to be told.
• 28:31
  Deborah Holman: She says, Well, I don't want you writing about her like you know, she's a crazy drunk Irish woman.
• 28:37
  Deborah Holman: And I'm thinking, but she probably was a crazy drunk Irish woman.
• 28:41
  Deborah Holman: So I didn't want to upset my sister-in-law.
• 28:44
  Deborah Holman: I really wanted to write the book.
• 28:46
  Deborah Holman: So we talked about it a little more, and then finally, um, my husband's sister said she decided to reconcile, and and she she kind of spun it in a good way, actually, that this was a woman who had a very strong, independent spirit.
• 29:05
  Deborah Holman: She wasn't gonna let any man tell her what to do, and she was gonna find her own way no matter what, and she did.
• 29:12
  Deborah Holman: Okay, and and with that mindset, she was fine with the story.
• 29:19
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 29:19
  Crista Cowan: Um, did they grow up?
• 29:22
  Crista Cowan: Did your husband and his sister grow up with their grandma Kitty?
• 29:26
  Crista Cowan: Like, did Kitty ever share stories about her mother with them?
• 29:29
  Crista Cowan: Nope.
• 29:29
  Crista Cowan: Not at all.
• 29:30
  Deborah Holman: No, no one said a word about anything.
• 29:34
  Deborah Holman: So as best as I could figure, I don't think Ida and Kitty, uh Jack had to know because he was married to Kitty, but Jack died in 1916, very young.
• 29:47
  Deborah Holman: So I don't think that anybody after Catherine's two children knew anything.
• 29:54
  Crista Cowan: And you found it all something about those genealogists that just keep on digging, huh?
• 29:59
  Crista Cowan: And we just don't let it go.
• 30:01
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 30:03
  Deborah Holman: So tell us what is the title of the book.
• 30:06
  Deborah Holman: So the book is called Countess of Cons.
• 30:09
  Deborah Holman: And the reason I chose that title after I originally had called it Opulent in Aliases, because that was the headline of one of the newspaper articles.
• 30:19
  Deborah Holman: And I thought, what a great head, what a great title.
• 30:22
  Deborah Holman: But a lot of people told me they didn't like it.
• 30:25
  Deborah Holman: So the reason I chose Countess of Cons, at one point, Catherine petitions the court to change her name to Countess Corina Pont's Forte.
• 30:35
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 30:36
  Deborah Holman: And it must have been a very slow newsday in town.
• 30:42
  Deborah Holman: I think that was St.
• 30:42
  Deborah Holman: Louis.
• 30:43
  Deborah Holman: Um, the newspaper ran the whole story.
• 30:46
  Deborah Holman: They wrote a poem about her, they put caricatures of her.
• 30:50
  Deborah Holman: Um, but the judge said, No, we're we don't give titles like that in America.
• 30:57
  Deborah Holman: And she said, Oh no, no, that was my name.
• 31:00
  Deborah Holman: I was born with that.
• 31:02
  Deborah Holman: I just simply dropped it.
• 31:04
  Deborah Holman: Like, you know, other people dropped their first names and go by their middle names.
• 31:08
  Deborah Holman: Well, her middle name wasn't Karina either.
• 31:10
  Crista Cowan: So the fact that she was so notorious that there were so many newspaper articles, and that nobody in the family knew this is kind of amazing to me.
• 31:20
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I mean, you know, families do keep secrets, but I don't think they knew this one.
• 31:26
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it wasn't a secret to keep.
• 31:28
  Crista Cowan: It sounds like it was just it just completely fell off their radar entirely.
• 31:32
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, and you know, with all the newspaper coverage, you know, it's not like it is today.
• 31:37
  Deborah Holman: The newspapers aren't connected really so much.
• 31:41
  Deborah Holman: And the towns, you know, the obviously there's some convers conversation between places because otherwise the guy in Indiana wouldn't have known she was in jail in Illinois.
• 31:53
  Deborah Holman: Right.
• 31:53
  Deborah Holman: But, you know, they don't have the network, they didn't have that network back then.
• 31:58
  Crista Cowan: And yet still, she she got around and so the news got around.
• 32:01
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:02
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 32:03
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 32:03
  Crista Cowan: Well, if you have any advice for anybody who uh uncovers something like this in their own family tree, what would your advice be to them?
• 32:13
  Deborah Holman: If it's a story that's not going to hurt somebody down the line, keep digging.
• 32:19
  Deborah Holman: Keep, you know, and if it doesn't make sense, try different names, try different places, um, keep keep connecting the dots because sometimes, you know, I I had a the this a completely wrong census for her until I found her mother's will.
• 32:37
  Deborah Holman: So sometimes one document will solve a problem that you didn't think was solvable.
• 32:44
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 32:45
  Crista Cowan: Well, Deborah, thank you so much.
• 32:47
  Crista Cowan: So fascinating.
• 32:48
  Crista Cowan: Okay, this season on the podcast, we're doing something a little different at the end of each episode.
• 32:54
  Crista Cowan: So I have a story box, and we are going to do a little one-word, one story.
• 33:02
  Crista Cowan: You are a storyteller, so I'm sure this will be no problem for you.
• 33:10
  Crista Cowan: Okay, today's word is hat.
• 33:15
  Deborah Holman: Oh, well, you that was an easy one for me.
• 33:19
  Deborah Holman: My great-grandfather was a hat maker in Vienna, Austria.
• 33:23
  Deborah Holman: What?
• 33:24
  Deborah Holman: Oh my goodness.
• 33:25
  Deborah Holman: And he actually won the 1901 prize for best designed hat at the Paris exhibition.
• 33:35
  Crista Cowan: Oh my goodness, that's amazing.
• 33:37
  Crista Cowan: And did he he bring that skill with him to the U.S.?
• 33:41
  Crista Cowan: Is that what he did here?
• 33:42
  Deborah Holman: Yes.
• 33:43
  Deborah Holman: Yeah.
• 33:43
  Deborah Holman: And he was he was the one that um it was his the loss of his business in 1938 that prompted me to write the first book.
• 33:53
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 33:53
  Crista Cowan: Well, my hat story.
• 33:55
  Crista Cowan: Um, so my grandfather, um, he was 50 years old when I was born, my dad's dad.
• 34:02
  Crista Cowan: And he worked for the city of Los Angeles his whole career.
• 34:06
  Crista Cowan: And so he had to dress up to go into the office every day as a city engineer.
• 34:11
  Crista Cowan: And he retired when I was fairly young still, back when people would retire, you know, they'd hit their 20 or 30 years of service and be done.
• 34:21
  Crista Cowan: Um, and he decided he was not going to dress up ever again.
• 34:26
  Crista Cowan: And so he started wearing just very casual clothes.
• 34:30
  Crista Cowan: He built himself a workshop and started doing woodworking.
• 34:33
  Crista Cowan: And he also started collecting baseball caps.
• 34:37
  Crista Cowan: And so um, my the next door neighbor, my grandfather's next door neighbor, they lived in Los Angeles.
• 34:43
  Crista Cowan: He was a cameraman for television shows like MASH and Magnum PI.
• 34:49
  Crista Cowan: And so every time he would go on a new set, he would always bring my grandfather one of the hats from the set.
• 34:56
  Crista Cowan: And then every time my grandfather would go visit a new place, he would get a hat.
• 35:02
  Crista Cowan: And what each of us started college, we would get him a hat.
• 35:05
  Crista Cowan: Like so, so he had them lined up um on a rack in the laundry room just off uh their patio.
• 35:12
  Crista Cowan: And that's just anytime I see the word hat, I think about my grandfather and his ridiculous baseball hat collection.
• 35:20
  Crista Cowan: I think my dad uh and my brothers each inherited some of those hats.
• 35:25
  Crista Cowan: Uh, I don't know what happened to the rest of them, but that's kind of a fun memory.
• 35:30
  Deborah Holman: Yeah, what an awesome thing to collect.
• 35:32
  Crista Cowan: Right?
• 35:33
  Crista Cowan: And there must have been some really cool hats, though.
• 35:36
  Crista Cowan: There were.
• 35:37
  Crista Cowan: I think I have, I don't know.
• 35:38
  Crista Cowan: I'd have to ask and see if anybody ever took a picture of them before uh my grandmother moved out of the house.
• 35:44
  Crista Cowan: But yeah, yeah.
• 35:45
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 35:46
  Crista Cowan: If you uh watching or listening have a story about hats, does there some memory that comes to mind?
• 35:54
  Crista Cowan: I would love to hear about it.
• 35:55
  Crista Cowan: If you're watching on YouTube, drop it in the comments here.
• 35:58
  Crista Cowan: If you're listening on a podcast app, post it to your Facebook or your Instagram and tag me.
• 36:05
  Crista Cowan: I would love to read your story.
• 36:06
  Crista Cowan: But more important than that, share your stories with your family.
• 36:11
  Crista Cowan: So fun.
• 36:14
  Crista Cowan: Well, Deborah, thank you again for sharing the Countess of Cons with us.
• 36:19
  Crista Cowan: Um, I'm excited to see what you uncover next.
• 36:23
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.