Maureen K Wlodarczyk

Maureen Wlodarczyk (www.past-forward.com) is an author, columnist, genealogist, speaker, and admitted history addict. She is also an officer of the Flannery Clan organization based in Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Hudson County Historical and Genealogical Society and the Irish-American Writers and Artists organization. She was the recipient of 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020 "Excellence in Writing" awards from the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors. Her book Scarlet Letter Lives was selected a finalist in the 2016 National Indie Excellence Book Award competition.

Maureen writes a genealogy-related column "History & Mystery: Perfect Together" for the e-magazine Garden State Legacy (www.gardenstatelegacy.com) and is a contributor to Irish Lives Remembered e-magazine (www.irishlivesremembered.com).

Maureen's latest book is Impostor: A Tale of Identity Lost & Found, a story that asks the question: Can a person every say, with certainty, who they are? Impostor is the story of a woman living in fear of rediscovering her lost identity. She makes the decision to confront her demons, only to find out that she never really knew who she was in the first place. In the end, her journey back in time proves to be an exercise that truly defines the essence of her identity for the first time.

Maureen's previous books are:

Birthless: A Tale of Family Lost & Found, a story that asks the question: Is it ever "too late" to confront long-kept secrets and life-altering decisions? The reader will take a heartfelt journey from New York to Scotland and Ireland with three women whose friendship helps them face a reckoning with the long-concealed secrets of their youthful pasts. Memories of first love, young motherhood and painful decisions are resurrected as each of them searches for reconciliation and peace after decades of self-imposed silence. What awaits them are unexpected discoveries that will redefine their understanding of love, loss, motherhood, friendship and the meaning of family.

-Scarlet Letter Lives, historical fiction based on the true lives of three Southern families spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries whose stories intersect through one woman and three copies of Nathaniel Hawthorne's book The Scarlet Letter. That woman will ultimately tell the tale of the three families and reveal the secret that defined her own life.

-Past-Forward: A Three-Decade & Three-Thousand Mile Journey Home is the story of her 30-year search for her grandmother's Irish ancestral roots and the surprising and poignant discoveries made along the way.

-Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl, is the true story of star-crossed first generation Irish-American lovers, one of them a second cousin to Maureen's great-grandmother, who grew up in Jersey City, both becoming young petty criminals who fled to the Bowery in New York City in 1893 to avoid arrest where their life together met a violent end.

-Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case is the third book in Maureen's trilogy of true family stories of the 19th century. In 1878, a Jersey City policeman is found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his own bed, supposedly while his young wife lay beside him unaware. Suspicion immediately falls on the wife and her suspected teenage paramour. Did a twenty-something Jersey girl and farmer's daughter turn city-girl killer?

-Jersey! Then . . . Again, a collection of 36 short stories about New Jersey historic people and events. Suffragettes, boxers, hurricanes, gangs, hot air balloonists, con artists, politicians, inventors, women in the war effort, military heroes and more -- it all happened in New Jersey!