Cold Open: A Hidden Ancestor

Crista Cowan 0:00

Have you ever stumbled across an ancestor in your family tree who made you stop and ask, who were you really? Some of us grow up with sanitized versions of our family history. Until a single clue changes everything. 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. 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. 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. Enjoy my conversation with Deborah Holman. Hi,

Family Stories And Family Silences

Crista Cowan 0:51

I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family. Welcome to Stories That Live In Up. Well, Deborah, thank you so much for coming. I'm really excited that you have um like taken this story and run with it. And you've got a book coming out, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But I would just love to start back all the way at the beginning for you. Uh were you raised in a family that family history was something that was important? Was there stories told, or was that something that was kind of just always tucked under wraps?

Deborah Holman 1:31

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. What do you mean by that? Both my parents are Jewish, they're divorced, they divorced when I was young. Um, and my mom and uh her mom and grandmother, they fled Vienna in 1938. No, and my grandfather was in a concentration two concentration camps, actually.

Crista Cowan 2:04

Nobody talked about that, but everything else we talked about. Well, and I imagine those traumatic experiences for a lot of people, they just wanted to leave them behind them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, um, so did your parents immigrate together or separately?

Deborah Holman 2:21

No, my mom's uh family was the family in Europe, and they came in uh 1938. My grandfather got out of the concentration camp at 39. My dad's family has been here since 1859. Wow, okay.

Crista Cowan 2:36

And where so your mom's family was from Austria? Yeah, and then your dad's family was from where?

Deborah Holman 2:44

Uh London. Okay. They settled first in Hoboken and then Brooklyn. Okay, and then how did your parents meet? They lived next door to each other. Stop it. Yeah, seriously. Um my um my dad's family moved from Brooklyn to New Rochelle in the 50s, early 50s. And my mom, of course, uh, they came in 38, and it was my uncle, my uncle managed the apartment house. And so when they needed a place to go, he sponsored them. So that's where they came to this apartment house in New Rochelle. And my grandmother lived there until she died in 1972. Wow. So did you know all four of your grandparents? 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. So growing up, all four of my grandparents lived across the hall from each other. What presented its own set of challenges? Yeah. 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. And there were five of us, so it was hard to sneak.

Crista Cowan 4:00

Yeah, I bet. 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.

Deborah Holman 4:13

Yeah, yeah, great stories. And and as I got older, I found that the stories were even more interesting than I even imagined.

Testing A Myth With DNA

Crista Cowan 4:22

So as you got older, like what was it that sparked your your interest in actually pursuing family history as a hobby?

Deborah Holman 4:29

My father told us we were the black Irish, which I don't I never even looked it up to see what that was. Um, and I was very proud of being Irish. And I loved St. Patrick's Day and all of this. And uh by 2007, my dad had pancreatic cancer and it wasn't looking good. So I decided I wanted to find out once and for all the if he was right. And I remember going, he lived in Toronto by then. 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. That sounds very Irish plausible, right? So I said, Dad, you know, the the only ancestor named Barney I can find is your grandfather, and he was born in Brooklyn. I don't think we're Irish. And he said, Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Oh maybe goes, maybe we're Scottish. Well, we are not, thank you, Ancestry DNA. Um, not a drop of Irish, Scottish, or anything like that. But that was when I started my genealogy in 2007, and that's what got me started.

Crista Cowan 5:45

That is so fun. So, where did your dad's family end up taking you?

Deborah Holman 5:49

Well, they uh I traced him back, his family back as far as London, um 1720, 1795, which is pretty decent for Jews. Yeah. Um, but I figured, you know, they all got kicked out in the 1400s, so I knew they had to come from somewhere. 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.

Crista Cowan 6:20

Okay. So so you got interested for your into your own family history because of the stories and stuff from your dad. When did you decide to start pursuing your husband's family tree?

The Taped-Over Name Mystery

Deborah Holman 6:32

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. You know, it was one of those hand-typed, printed at the print shop, spiral bound kind of things. Yeah. And it was falling, so by the 2000s, it was really falling apart. So my sister-in-law and I decided to rework it and publish it as a hardcover version for everybody in the family. And that was in 2015. And so that is when I first started learning more about my husband's family.

Crista Cowan 7:13

Did his dad like just present the information or did it include stories in that original publication?

Deborah Holman 7:20

He wrote, he was a very good writer, and he wrote, you know, really nice like stories. Not he wrote it sort of as a narrative, but you know, first person narrative. Um, the only problem was his memory was not very good. So as I as I'm reading it, I'm like, this doesn't seem right, and that doesn't seem right. So I decided to kind of check into a couple of things. And so I started for some I guess I decided to start with his great-grandmother. 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. Like somebody had taken a name, taken a piece of paper and taped the name that they referred to her by, Katherine C. Fitz Allen. And they taped it over something. So I'm like, what's up with that? What's underneath? What's underneath there? Right. And I asked everybody, nobody has the original. That's the only thing we have. Interesting. So I decided to do a little digging, and I went on the you know, message boards back then were a lot more active. 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. And I'm like, these names sound super familiar. And so I kind of cross-referenced it, and I realized that that was my husband's great-grandmother. In the article, it said that she had kidnapped the other daughter. What? I'm like, there's a story here. So one article became 10 articles, became a hundred articles, and I lost the next two years of my life.

Tracking Aliases Through Newspaper Clues

Crista Cowan 9:27

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?

Deborah Holman 9:43

I just went on to all the newspaper sites I could think of. Okay. And got, and the more articles I found, the more confused I was, because there were articles about Katherine Seeley and William Seely. 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. I was like, what is happening here? Yeah, as it turns out, it was all my husband's great-grandmother doing everything, and she just had a tons of aliases.

Crista Cowan 10:24

Oh goodness. So, how did you like I want to get to the actual story of her because I'm super fascinated? I like I've heard you tell the story once before, and I just love it. But how did you ultimately start to put the pieces together that you really were dealing with the same person? And that and then how did you organize the story so that it made sense?

Deborah Holman 10:48

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. So, you know, 20 years at least of you know, a lot of activity. 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. Um, Ron had written a book called Mind Maps.

Crista Cowan 11:27

Uh-huh.

Deborah Holman 11:28

And I and I used that along with Excel spreadsheets to untangle everything. Oh goodness. And there was otherwise, there was no way to figure it out. And you said it took you about two years? 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. Oh my goodness.

Society Dreams Then Divorce Fallout

Crista Cowan 11:51

Oh, so tell us the story. Like, like if you start at the beginning of Catherine's life, what what is the story of her?

Deborah Holman 11:58

Unfortunately, Catherine is the genealogist's nightmare. She has, I have yet to find a birth record for her, despite almost 10 years of looking. Um, and because she was less than honest, you know, some censuses say she was born in Ireland, some say New York. But, you know, that you never know. 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. By 1860, she married and she she married William Seely, who came from Connecticut. And he was a pretty up-and-coming uh they called him drovers. The job was to move cattle from one place to another. Um, and somehow in Albany, he hooked up with Gus Swift, which is now um Swift and Company, the sausage sausage people. Gus offered him a job, and so William started to become pretty wealthy. Somewhere rather quickly, Catherine married him. The next thing you know, they're in backwoods, Kansas in 1861, and she's miserable. Well, Kansas City is a place for cattle drovers, right?

Crista Cowan 13:22

Yeah.

Deborah Holman 13:23

Uh she has a daughter by then, Ida, her first daughter. Um, and she's just miserable. And according to the divorce, you know, the papers back then were phenomenal. So, I mean, they listed everything. They'd be so sued now. Um, she was she would just berate him constantly to move. So they went from this backwoods Kansas, like log cabin, and he finally agrees to move her to Kansas City. Within two years, they have this beautiful three-story home in Kansas City. I think they built it in 1887 or 1886, 1871, I'm sorry. Uh, beautiful home, and she's uh moving in high society in Kansas City, and she's thrilled. This is that's her goal, right? Is to be seen as a high society person. And um then the uh by by 1888, William has had enough. They're about 50 years old, each one of them. The girls are more or less grown, and so he sues her for divorce. She countersues, loses, and then kind of flips out. And the next thing you know, she's moving all around the Midwest committing crimes. What? And you know, she was um and and a nice variety too, not just your you know, petty theft. 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. Um at one point in one town over a weekend, she broke into 50 homes. What? Yeah, she and she was 60 years old. Oh my goodness. 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. And she would pull the old lady, you know, confused act, and they'd let her go.

Crista Cowan 15:30

Oh my goodness. And are her like, is she still in the Kansas City area? Like, are her daughters and their families nearby? Like, does anybody know what's happening?

Deborah Holman 15:39

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. Ida, her older one, sort of becomes her enabler, I guess, for lack of a better word. The younger daughter tries to disassociate herself and marries, uh, in Catherine's words, a no-good low-down, dirty fab uh grocery clerk. And so I kitty gets out and goes on her goes away on her own, but Ida kind of sticks with her. 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. And it finally they end up back, they end up in Chicago, where they still have connections to Gus Swift. They have friends there from Albany. 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. So that was an un you know, I mean, to me, that was the worst thing. Yeah. You know, you know, hurting kids and and making kids go out and beg for you in snowstorms. So she had six indictments against her in Chicago, which is where she she spent the rest of her life in the Chicago area. Wow.

Crista Cowan 17:13

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. And at 50 years old, she'd raised a family and followed him across the country. 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? No, nothing. Wow.

Deborah Holman 17:47

And and you know, you say she had no source of income. She had income. Did she? Yeah. 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. So in 1889, she was earning fifteen hundred dollars a month. That's a lot of money. Yeah, it is. So, you know, I at first I was like, oh, you know, poor 50-year-old divorced Catherine. She, you know, she's gotta find a way to provide for her and her two girls. But it wasn't about money, I don't think, because she had money. But you know, for some people, there's a hole and it's never enough. So I don't know. And she also was a very independent person. She didn't want to be beholden to anybody or told what to do. And there there's not a lot of opportunities in 1889 for a in you know, for a divorced woman. Yeah. But I could never, and I still can't after all these years. She wants to be seen and valued as a high society woman, but she chooses crime. I just can't reconcile that.

Crista Cowan 19:07

So there's no in all of your research, there's no indication of her motives or her mental state or any of that?

Deborah Holman 19:15

Well, her mental state is another question. Okay. Um, it's very you don't it's very hard to write about people who can't defend themselves, right? Because you don't know. But there is definitely mental illness in her family. Her older sister died in an institution in Utica. Her nephew killed his wife and ended up in an institution. Her younger sister had what probably we would now call postpartum and ended up in an institution. So there was something definitely in the family lines that makes me think that had something to do with it.

Crista Cowan 20:01

Yeah.

Motive Questions And The Orphanage

Crista Cowan 20:02

And then where does Catherine fall in like the birth order in her family? You said there were 12 siblings.

Deborah Holman 20:08

She was about five down, I think. And then there were seven after her, all born in Ireland except except for one.

Crista Cowan 20:17

Okay, so she's a middle middle child of a large family. She has a husband with a high-profile career that takes them to the middle of nowhere. She raises these two girls, and once they're raised, she's just kind of done living everybody else's life, it sounds like.

Deborah Holman 20:34

Yeah, yeah. And she also had some sad losses, too. She lost two children in between Ida and Catherine. One one died very young, like six months in Connecticut, and the other in Albany at about age 10. So I'm sure that was difficult too.

Crista Cowan 20:51

Oh, yeah. Those are that's very traumatic for a mother, especially. Yeah. So she ends up in Chicago, starts this orphanage with her daughter. Um, and but for all intents and purposes, the orphanage is a front for her to continue different forms of criminal activity. Exactly. And is that where she stays then till she dies?

Deborah Holman 21:14

No. 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. Because at that point, it was not jail, it would be penitentiary, you know, with that. So she decided to go on a several-week road trip, which I documented in the book because it was just so fascinating. And she went around like Lawrence, Kansas, and you know, all of these places. Uh she went, she went to Indiana, um, other places in Illinois. I think she went to Nebraska on the same trip. And everywhere she went, she traveled for free because she had calling cards. And said she was Mrs. So and so representing such and such charity, and they would give her a free rail pass. The thing she did mistakenly was she wrote it all down. What? This story just gets weirder and weirder. You could not make this up if you tried. She is documenting her. Yeah, like in a little accounting book. She had two of them. 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. So she would always, you know, add in, you know, some the first couple. Um and then she'd write down everything that she made wherever she went. And uh when she ended up back, after a while, she was just getting tired. She ended up back in Chicago. Um, oh, after she attempted to burn her house down for insurance. I forgot that. When she was in Indiana, she rented a house and then disappeared for three days during which the house burned down, surprisingly. Okay. 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. So she got mad, and that's why she went back to Chicago. Wow. And how old is she by this time? Um I think she was probably in her mid-sixties by then. Okay. So when she got back to Chicago, she did something else stupid. Um, she tried to steal something from a department store and she got caught. 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. So then they reinstated all the uh indictments. But she found a lawyer. 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. Um, but she got found a lawyer that got all the indictments um squash washed, I guess is the word. And she went free and clear.

Crista Cowan 24:11

Wow. So it's interesting. Like, I mean, she's this woman in her 60s in the 1890s. She has money, but continues to live this life of crime. Was she particularly beautiful or was she paying? Like, were the lawyers just in it for the money? Or why do you think people kept why do you think people kept giving her money?

Deborah Holman 24:34

I think she was very, very savvy, very, very smart. 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. Um, but she was absolutely no beauty. Uh, one of the newspaper articles said she had a mustache that any gentleman would would uh wish for. That's terrible. Not much of a looker there. She had a way of charming people.

Crista Cowan 25:12

Sounds like it. Wow. So what then she gets off this time again? Like, what does the end of her life look like?

The Ledger, The Fire, The Escape

Deborah Holman 25:20

So she finds another guy. She's 73. 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. So she marries him. The marriage lasted barely six months. Um, so she got uh it was another sensational divorce case there. They got divorced in 1907. She divorced him because she realized she wasn't getting any of his money. 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. Um, by then, her youngest daughter, Catherine, was married to a man named John Holman, who is my husband's grandfather. And she actually had, of course, quite a bit of money by now. 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. She gave him the money to build this apartment building. Kitty, her daughter, and his nickname was Jack. Kitty and Jack lived in the apartment building. And then she decided to buy a farm in Glenville, Illinois, which is right, you know, next door. And she and Ida lived out, uh, Catherine lived the rest of her life, which was five more years, on this farm in Glenview.

Crista Cowan 27:01

Wow. For being so unhappy for living in the middle of nowhere, Kansas. She had no problem living in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, at the end of her life, huh? I get well, yeah, yeah.

Deborah Holman 27:10

She was pretty unhealthy, I think. Um, also. She was she was quite the drinker. So I think she had a lot of health issues. So um, I don't think she was moving very well by then.

Crista Cowan 27:22

Yeah, wow.

Writing The Book Without Shame

Crista Cowan 27:23

So here's my here's my question to you. As you were unraveling this story over the years, were you sharing this information with your husband about it's his great-grandmother, yeah? Great-grandmother, yeah. Yeah. His great grandma. 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?

Deborah Holman 27:43

Oh, I'm sharing them with him. 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. His sister's about 16 years older than him. 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. His sister did not think so. Oh no. Okay. When I told her, you know, what I found, this was uh in 2018. When I told her what I found and that I wanted to write a book about it, she was not happy at all. And I said, Well, I really think this is a story that needs to be told. She says, Well, I don't want you writing about her like you know, she's a crazy drunk Irish woman. And I'm thinking, but she probably was a crazy drunk Irish woman. So I didn't want to upset my sister-in-law. I really wanted to write the book. 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. 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. Okay, and and with that mindset, she was fine with the story.

Crista Cowan 29:19

Okay. Um, did they grow up? Did your husband and his sister grow up with their grandma Kitty? Like, did Kitty ever share stories about her mother with them? Nope. Not at all.

Deborah Holman 29:30

No, no one said a word about anything. 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. So I don't think that anybody after Catherine's two children knew anything.

Crista Cowan 29:54

And you found it all something about those genealogists that just keep on digging, huh? And we just don't let it go. Right.

Deborah Holman 30:03

So tell us what is the title of the book. So the book is called Countess of Cons. 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. And I thought, what a great head, what a great title. But a lot of people told me they didn't like it. 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. What? And it must have been a very slow newsday in town. I think that was St. Louis. Um, the newspaper ran the whole story. They wrote a poem about her, they put caricatures of her. Um, but the judge said, No, we're we don't give titles like that in America. And she said, Oh no, no, that was my name. I was born with that. I just simply dropped it. Like, you know, other people dropped their first names and go by their middle names. Well, her middle name wasn't Karina either.

Crista Cowan 31:10

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. Yeah, I mean, you know, families do keep secrets, but I don't think they knew this one. Yeah, it wasn't a secret to keep. It sounds like it was just it just completely fell off their radar entirely.

Deborah Holman 31:32

Yeah, and you know, with all the newspaper coverage, you know, it's not like it is today. The newspapers aren't connected really so much. 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. Right. But, you know, they don't have the network, they didn't have that network back then.

Crista Cowan 31:58

And yet still, she she got around and so the news got around. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay.

How To Keep Digging Ethically

Crista Cowan 32:04

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?

Deborah Holman 32:13

If it's a story that's not going to hurt somebody down the line, keep digging. 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. So sometimes one document will solve a problem that you didn't think was solvable.

Crista Cowan 32:44

Yeah. Well, Deborah, thank you so much. So fascinating. Okay,

One-Word Story: Hat

Crista Cowan 32:49

this season on the podcast, we're doing something a little different at the end of each episode. So I have a story box, and we are going to do a little one-word, one story. You are a storyteller, so I'm sure this will be no problem for you. Okay, today's word is hat.

Deborah Holman 33:15

Oh, well, you that was an easy one for me. My great-grandfather was a hat maker in Vienna, Austria. What? Oh my goodness. And he actually won the 1901 prize for best designed hat at the Paris exhibition.

Crista Cowan 33:35

Oh my goodness, that's amazing. And did he he bring that skill with him to the U.S.? Is that what he did here?

Deborah Holman 33:42

Yes. Yeah. 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.

Crista Cowan 33:53

That's amazing. Well, my hat story. Um, so my grandfather, um, he was 50 years old when I was born, my dad's dad. And he worked for the city of Los Angeles his whole career. And so he had to dress up to go into the office every day as a city engineer. 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. Um, and he decided he was not going to dress up ever again. And so he started wearing just very casual clothes. He built himself a workshop and started doing woodworking. And he also started collecting baseball caps. And so um, my the next door neighbor, my grandfather's next door neighbor, they lived in Los Angeles. He was a cameraman for television shows like MASH and Magnum PI. And so every time he would go on a new set, he would always bring my grandfather one of the hats from the set. And then every time my grandfather would go visit a new place, he would get a hat. And what each of us started college, we would get him a hat. Like so, so he had them lined up um on a rack in the laundry room just off uh their patio. And that's just anytime I see the word hat, I think about my grandfather and his ridiculous baseball hat collection. I think my dad uh and my brothers each inherited some of those hats. Uh, I don't know what happened to the rest of them, but that's kind of a fun memory.

Deborah Holman 35:30

Yeah, what an awesome thing to collect.

Crista Cowan 35:32

Right? And there must have been some really cool hats, though. There were. I think I have, I don't know. I'd have to ask and see if anybody ever took a picture of them before uh my grandmother moved out of the house. But yeah, yeah. Okay. If you uh watching or listening have a story about hats, does there some memory that comes to mind? I would love to hear about it. If you're watching on YouTube, drop it in the comments here. If you're listening on a podcast app, post it to your Facebook or your Instagram and tag me. I would love to read your story. But more important than that, share your stories with your family. So fun. Well, Deborah, thank you again for sharing the Countess of Cons with us. Um, I'm excited to see what you uncover next. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.