<To the Editor - Can you give me any help in my search for long-lost relatives in Boston?

My great-grandfather was a Dr. James Winchell Stone of Boston, who was politically eminent in the last century and a friend of President Lincoln.

Mrs. Lincoln and my great-grandmother, Mrs. Jennie Stone (of Trenton, N.J.) were also fairly close friends, and I hold in my possession a family heirloom handed down in the form of a charming little note written by Mrs. Lincoln when she was a guest in Mrs. Stone's house - presumably after the President's death since the notepaper is lavishly endowed in black.

Round about 1890 and after the death of her husband, Mrs. Stone left Boston with her two daughters, Frances and Ella Gilmer (who was my grandmother) and went to Florence, where Mrs. Stone died in 1910.

There is, for instance, a human and dramatic little story about my grandmother, Ella Gilmer, who, betrothed virtually in the schoolroom, refused to marry some German count selected for her only three days before the wedding on the simple and reasonable grounds that "she didn't like him." Which must have been quite a thing in the days when daughters did what they were told!

I have always wondered if the social opprobrium of Boston society at the time contributed to Mrs. Stone's decision to take an extended holiday abroad.

Pam O'Keefe.