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.

This episode begins with the most SHOCKING, PRURIENT, and SCANDALOUS installment of "The Scullion's Hearth," Taylor Mali's entirely fictional (although completely plausible) account of what life might have been like in Marble House as seen through the eyes of housemaid named Bridget (beautifully read by New York City actress Megan McQuillan)! Also included are some updates on planned activities for the long-awaited family reunion in June of 2024.

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.

Taylor talks with his second cousin Sarah Elder (1947) about how to be a lady and the tribal nature of most of the world. They talk about privilege and whether you can hide it, the paucity of motherly love, and the "poor cousins" who had to attend The Chapin School. What do you have the strength to endure out of kindness alone? Taylor recites entirely too many poems in the course of the interview, but Sarah confesses to having sex in the maid's rooms of her grandmother's apartment. Interestingly, this is the first episode of the series in which the name John Taylor Johnston is never mentioned.

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.

Taylor Mali interviews distant cousin B. A. Van Sise, a charmingly nerdy photographer and polymath and one of the closest living relatives of Walt Whitman. THERE IS ONE WELL-PLACED SWEAR WORD EARLY IN THE EPISODE. There's also news of The Marble House Meeting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and audio clips of Broadway actor Michael Crane reading selections from Taylor's grandfather's journal. Van Sise asks Taylor whether his extended family considers him their "shepherd" or their "Judas Goat." Last, if you are a relative stranger and plan to be at the opening cocktail reception, you might want to remind yourself of the words to "Edelweiss."

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.

Host Taylor Mali reveals all he knows about his great-great-uncle Colles Johnston, the only one of the Johnston kids to have died without marrying or having children of his own; as a result, Colles will have no descendants representing his branch of the family at The Marble House Meeting in June of 2024, which starts with a cocktail reception at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This episode starts with a delicious bit of ancestral romance audio fan fiction called "The Scullion's Hearth" (voiced by the amazing Megan McQuillan!). If you are one of the relative strangers, please go RSVP to The Marble House Meeting using the link that Taylor includes in all his emails to the family.

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.

Marble House was the name given to the white marble townhouse built by John Taylor Johnston (with railroad money) at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 8th St. in the 1860s. He lived there with his wife Frances Colles Johnston and their five children—Emily, Colles, John Herbert, Frances, and Eva—until they all died or got married and moved out. After the last family member moved out, it was for many years a boarding house (still called "Marble House"), but it was torn down in the 1940s or 50s to make room for the building that stands there today. The Marble House Meeting will be the name of the reunion of all the descendants—the relative strangers—when they gather in New York City next June, starting with a cocktail reception at The Met. In this episode host Taylor Mali talks about the new plans and urges his cousins to RSVP. If you'd like to see what Marble House looked like in 1936, click here to see a famous photo taken by Berenice Abbott.

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.