Past-Forward, a non-fiction account of author Maureen K. Wlodarczyk’s thirty-year search for her grandmother’s Irish ancestral roots, published by Outskirts Press, was released on January 23, 2010 and can be purchased on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com (see link on this page). The book, written in the form of a letter to Maureen’s grandmother Kate, tells both the story of the thirty-year search itself along with the discovered tale of Kate’s Irish ancestors from the late eighteenth century in the West of Ireland, to their emigration to America in the mid-nineteenth century fleeing the devastating potato famine and through the next eight decades in Jersey City, New Jersey as successive generations struggled to make their way despite hardship and tragedy.
Back cover excerpt:
“Time can’t ‘heal all wounds’ but traveling its dusty, winding paths searching for its long-lost stories can be a journey of love that ultimately soothes those wounds with the balm of context and perspective.
I am a DNA dead-end. The journey of a genetic signature that originated tens of thousands of years ago and wound its way through the ages, the eras, the centuries and generations of my maternal ancestors to fuse into my being at the moment of my own conception ends with me. Maternal DNA, called mitochondrial DNA or MtDNA, is passed by mothers to all their children, male or female, but only daughters can pass it on to the next generation. That means that the MtDNA passed on by mother to daughter for thousands of years remains the very same MtDNA. Whenever a woman does not give birth to a daughter, she becomes a DNA dam, a DNA dead-end….like me.
My maternal DNA was one of many hereditary gifts given to me by my ancestors including my dear grandmother Kate. Kate survived a sad and turbulent childhood at the turn of the twentieth century in order to make that gift which resulted in my safe, secure childhood, starkly different from her own. For more than thirty years during Kate’s life and after her death, I struggled to research her family lineage and history, determined to discover her “story” and dilute her painful childhood memories with a broad tale of the generations that defined us. This is that tale…..”
