Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781477562406)

Maureen Wlodarczyk is an author, columnist, genealogist, speaker, and admitted history addict. She is also an officer and YDNA project administrator with the Flannery Clan organization based in Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Genealogical Society of New Jersey, Hudson County Historical and Genealogical Society and the Irish-American Writers and Artists organization. Maureen writes a twice-monthly local history column titled "Hudson Then . . . Again" for the River View Observer newspaper (www.riverviewobserver.net) and a quarterly genealogy-related column "History & Mystery: Perfect Together" for the e-magazine Garden State Legacy (www.gardenstatelegacy.com). Maureen's first book, 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. Her second book, 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. Maureen's third book Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case is historical fiction based on the true story of an 1878 murder in Jersey City, NJ. A local 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 from the rural farmlands turn city-girl killer? Maureen has a blog (www.past-forward.com/blog) with additional stories about the Irish family introduced in Past-Forward along with other stories of historical and genealogical interest.