From Ancestry Message Board to Arson Files: Uncovering Catherine Seeley’s True Motive

NOTE: This post has also been cross-posted to my author blog: https://deborahsholman.com/

I didn’t set out to write about a con artist.

I wasn’t even researching criminals. I was trying to get the facts straight about my husband’s great-grandmother, known in the family as Catherine C. Fitzallen.

I was scrolling through an Ancestry message board, and found note about a divorce case in Kansas City, posted by someone I didn’t know.

It mentioned a woman named Catherine Seeley. I recognized that name as the one used by Catherine Fitzallen before her 1889 divorce.

That single note wouldn’t leave me alone. I clicked the link through to the newspaper article. Then another. Then, I chased the name through a second state, and a third.

Eventually, I had more than 250 articles.

At some point along that chain, it became clear I wasn’t doing a fact-check.

I had just met my next book.

That was how Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter began—not with a plot idea, but with a woman in a newspaper column who wasn’t content to be a footnote.

She wasn’t the expected “type”

We have a comfortable narrative for nineteenth-century women who cross the law: they are desperate, impoverished, out of options, and acting out of survival.

We justify their “indiscretions” by their circumstances. But, in this case, that would be completely wrong.

Catherine Seeley wasn’t a poor woman trying to claw her way up. She was clever, resourceful, and socially aware. And she moved around far more than most women of her time. She understood that reputation had value—sometimes more value than the truth itself.

She didn’t “fall” into crime. She chose it.

And the record shows that she did her boldest work after she was fifty.

Women her age weren’t supposed to demand more.
They were supposed to fade.

She did not.

The arson that tells the story

One of the episodes that still jolts me was in South Bend, Indiana.

It’s all documented.

She rented a house.
She had cheap furniture delivered—enough to look respectable.
Then she insured the lot.

Five days later, the house burned. She returned to file a claim.
The insurance company refused to pay.

But here’s what matters: this wasn’t Catherine “running out of options.” This was Catherine proving something to herself. She had just raised over $500 in Chicago (about $17,000 in today’s dollars), but instead of coasting, she wanted more.

The motive is not in any record, and because we like tidy narratives, we want a motive spelled out. We want the “why.” Why would she choose to escalate from simple cons to the crime of arson?

So, I did some research. Arson-for-insurance was a shortcut in the 1890s for people who didn’t want to wait. She didn’t torch the house because she was cornered. She torched it because waiting for money was intolerable.

Insurance was faster than philanthropy.
Fire was faster than patience.

Women weren’t supposed to want speed

Most nineteenth-century women were granted only a few legitimate paths to capital: marriage, widowhood, inheritance, boarding houses, or possibly teaching. Real ambition didn’t come through the front door—it had to sneak in from the side. Some women buried theirs. Some faded. Some broke under it. And some, like Catherine, hid it in aliases, fake papers, and train tickets.

Were there shadows of mental illness in her family line? Yes. Did Catherine herself show signs of manic risk-seeking or compulsive escalation? Possibly. But the records don’t give us a clear diagnosis—they show a pattern. And that pattern isn’t just illness. It’s appetite—wanting more.

Why I wanted to tell her story

Many women who move through history like this never get written about because they don’t fit the categories we’re comfortable with. We know how to write about martyrs, victims, trailblazers, saints.

We do not know how to write about women who were bold in ways that make us uneasy.

We don’t have much practice writing about women who didn’t just survive their era, but pushed against it. Catherine wasn’t a cautionary tale. She generated capital faster than the world around her believed a woman could. And she learned how to leave minimal fingerprints—until the moment she didn’t.

That tension—the gap between the woman the world expected and the woman she actually was—is the engine of my novel.

What the work has taught me

I didn’t write this book to excuse Catherine. I wrote it because she changes the angle of how we look at women in history.

Catherine forces us to ask different questions:

What if she didn’t want safety?
What if she wanted agency?

When I picture her standing in that South Bend house—her hand resting lightly on a crate, her diamond ring twisting between her fingers—I don’t see a woman driven by fear.

I see a woman deciding that time was too slow.

That’s where everything shifts.

That is where Countess of Cons: The Story of a Gilded Age Grifter took its first breath.

Not in invention—but in documentation.

Not from a “character idea”—but from a clipping on a message board.

She didn’t knock politely on my imagination.
She demanded attention.
And I’ve been giving it ever since

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