One hundred sixty-one years ago today—on July 1, 1863, which was a Wednesday—Frances Colles Johnston, the 37-year-old wife of John Taylor Johnston, took advantage of the sudden quiet in her father's summer house in Morristown, NJ, and dashed off a letter to her baby brother George Wetmore Colles who was fighting for the Union Army in The Civil War. In this episode of Relative Strangers, Taylor Mali talks with retired educator Kate McCabe, the self-proclaimed "Morristown Girl" who lived across the street from the Colles summer house and has been inside it and played in its back yard. It was McCabe who found the original handwritten letter and brought it to the attention of this podcast. The letter itself is read and performed by actor and friend-of-the-podcast Megan McQuillan.

The founding sponsor of Relative Strangers is FamilyTreeChart.com. Use promo code METROPOLITAN to get 10% off your first order. Please follow the podcast on Instagram at RelativeStrangersPodcast, where Taylor is generally a little less dramatic.

This episode is built around a 40-year-old recording of Eva Mali Noyes and her brother Henry "Harry" Mali conducted in 1984 by David and Rosemary Coffin. The recording was discovered by Cousin Amy Stewart Webb (1955) in a box of her mother's belongings, and the complete unedited recording can be accessed here. Cousin Taylor Mali (1965) had the audio restored (thanks to artificial intelligence and audio engineering teacher Chad Anderson), and he plays selected segments of the interview while providing context.

The founding sponsor of Relative Strangers is FamilyTreeChart.com. Use promo code METROPOLITAN to get 10% off your first order. Please follow the podcast on Instagram at RelativeStrangersPodcast, where Taylor is generally a little less dramatic.

With about 10 weeks to go before 100 distant cousins get together in New York City for the first time in over a century, Taylor Mali takes a closer look at three female ancestors that all the relative strangers share, Frances Colles, Rachel Ogden Wetmore, and Adrienne Cuvelier. Also included at the end of this episode are voice memos sent in from Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Caroline Dubois, Kate McCabe, Megan McQuillan, Tony Stewart, Olivia Jacobs, and Cordelia Pierson. Last, be sure to visit @RealtiveStrangersPodcast on Instagram to watch Trip Stowell talk about the Mystery Trunk that we will all break into on Saturday!

The founding sponsor of Relative Strangers is FamilyTreeChart.com. Use promo code METROPOLITAN to get 10% off your first order. Please follow the podcast on Instagram at RelativeStrangersPodcast, where Taylor is generally a little less dramatic.