12. The Letter

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.