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Joanna Wiśniewska
Joanna recording at a desk of old photographs
Old library reading room with long tables and green lamps

Family history podcast host

A podcast about the family stories in old letters and photographs

I’m Joanna. Every other week I open a box of old letters or photographs and follow the story back. Listen free, then get the guides to start on your own family’s.

Wall of pinned photographs and string timeline
Hands lifting a bundle of old letters from a shoebox

Kraków,

Letter no. 58

A shoebox of letters from 1946

Hands lifting a bundle of old letters from a shoebox

Hello,

The letters in the shoebox are from two sisters. One stayed in Kraków after the war, and one went to live with an aunt in a town I had never heard of. They wrote to each other every month for six years.

Most of the letters are about small things: a coat that needed mending, the price of sugar, a neighbour’s new baby. The big things are in the gaps between them, the months when no letter came.

This week I read the first ten aloud on the show. Next time I go to the archive to find the town, and the aunt.

Warmly,

Joanna

P.S. If you have a box like this at home, the Letter Transcription Template is the page I use to write each one out.

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Joanna walking across a cobbled Kraków square

About

About me

It began with a shoebox of letters I found at my grandmother’s flat in Kraków. I read them on her kitchen floor and wanted to know who every person in them was.

Now I make The Shoebox every other week from a desk covered in old photographs. I follow one letter or one picture back as far as it goes, and I make plain guides so you can do the same with your own family’s box.

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