She attended the Kent Place School in Summit, New Jersey, and earned a bachelor's degree in English from Wellesley College in 1952.

[4] "A typical Foreign Service couple of middle rank are crew-cut William Stoltzfus Jr. and his delicately pretty wife Janet," wrote columnist Jack Anderson in 1962.

[5] With her husband leading the U.S. legation based in Taiz that formed the center of United States–Yemen relations at the time, the Stoltzfuses were in North Yemen from 1959 to 1961.

[7] In 1997, Ambassador Stoltzfus gave an oral history interview and emphasized his opinion that "our most valuable contribution while we were in Yemen was my wife's school.

[10] After they left the United States Foreign Service in 1976,[11] the Stoltzfus home in Princeton, New Jersey, featured "crosses from Ethiopia, copperware from Iran, royal Arabic seals from Bahrein, a brass chest and a tall exquisite coffee pot from Saudi Arabia, and a massive hand-carved door from Kuwait", all souvenirs of their overseas service.