Relative Strangers
Poet and teacher Taylor Mali knows more about his family than anyone really needs to know, especially the branch that has lived in New York City for 400 years. However, they don't all know him or each other—they are relative strangers to each other—so getting all 450 of them to meet in person in the summer of 2024 is going to be a struggle or a train wreck.
Episodes
14 episodes
13. The Prospect of Freedom
In this episode, which is the first to have been recorded after the singularly wonderful and marvelously successful Marble House Meeting at the end of June, Taylor has a proper conversation with Kate McCabe, the retired...
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Season 1
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Episode 13
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34:22
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,...
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Season 1
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Episode 12
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20:02
11. We Children (Ausable Club Recollections)
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 b...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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25:54
10. The Mothers & the Grandmothers
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 C...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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34:59
9. Hanky Panky in Marble House in 1872!
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 se...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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19:05
8. "Drunk Cousin with an iPhone"
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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31:53
7. "We Were Forced to Eff Ourselves"
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
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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31:19
6. The Mystery of Colles Johnston
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 h...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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21:23
5. The Marble House Meeting
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
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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26:33
4. One Skeleton at a Time
Every family has secrets, and you eventually realize that most of them are not being kept from the world but from OTHER SIDES OF THE FAMILY! In this episode, cousin Taylor Mali talks about some of those secrets. For example, did you know...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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25:04
3. "The Boys Definitely Outplayed the Girls"
On this episode of Relative Strangers host Taylor Mali (1965) speaks with third cousin Robert Whitman Easton (1945), whom he has yet to meet in person, about pretentiousness, family resentment over perceived ine...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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26:19
2. Ascendancy vs. Descendancy
John Taylor Johnston, one of host Taylor Mali's great-great-grandfathers, was one of those 19th-century railroad tycoons whom Malcolm Gladwell has noted were all born in New York City within about a decade of one another. He may not have...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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14:35