Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter

A single newspaper clipping led genealogist Deborah S. Holman to a decades-long trail of aliases, schemes, arrests, court cases and reinvention. For generations, Catherine Seeley was remembered by her family as a sweet, gentle grandmother. Then Connecticut author and genealogist Deborah S. Holman found a newspaper clipping that told a very different story. That discovery launched the investigation behind Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter . Catherine Seeley spent decades reinventing herself as she moved from city to city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She assumed n…