Mary Ann (“Auntie”) Cord was the cook in the household of SLC’s in-laws Theodore and Susan Crane in Elmira, New York; the Clemenses spent their summers there. Born into slavery in Maryland, Mary Cord had lost her husband and seven children when the family was broken up and sold around 1852, only to be miraculously reunited, thirteen years later, with her youngest son, Henry, then a soldier in the Union army. Henry, who had escaped to Elmira before the Civil War and become a barber, brought his mother back with him when he resumed his career there. Her experience is recounted in Mark Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874), in which he called Mary Cord “Aunt Rachel.”