Biography

Author, Editor, noted adoptee. A travel writer and author of children's stories in her later life, the youthful Olive Risley shocked American society of the late 1860's by becoming the traveling companion of celebrated statesman William H. Seward. In an effort to quell gossip and suitably define their relationship, Seward, who was 43 years her senior, legally adopted her in 1870, although her father was still alive and well. He also named her a co-heir, with his three sons, to his estate. Born into a politically prominent family in New York's westernmost county, she was the daughter of the former Harriet C. Crosby and the Hon. Anson A. Risley, first solicitor of the Treasury under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Seward was then U.S. Secretary of State, and Olive had become part of his social circle in the years after the Civil War. The young woman and the widowed elder statesman may have bonded in grief. She had lost her mother in 1866, and Seward mourned the deaths of his beloved wife and their only daughter, both of whom had been injured during the attempt on his life in April 1865. Mrs. Seward had died of shock two months later, and the delicate Fanny Seward, who was the same age as Olive, had died a fortnight after the death of Mrs. Risley. Although Seward never fully recovered from his near-fatal wounds, he enjoyed traveling, and visited Alaska, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia after his retirement from the State Department. Olive and her sister accompanied him on his journeys, and she was listed as the editor of his best-selling book, "Travels Around the World", published after his death in 1872. Never married, she died in the nation's capital at age 60 and was buried with her parents in western New York.