Harry Wood Nash

Harry Wood Nash, 1869-1902

(My great grandfather)

Harry Wood Nash was born in Abington, Massachusetts, a southern suburb of Boston, in 1869. He was the oldest of three children born to Edward Everett Nash and Hannah Williams Nash.

The Nash's were long time Boston area residents – both Edward's father, Nathaniel Nash Jr. and his grandfather, Nathaniel Nash Sr., were from Massachusetts. Nathaniel Nash Sr. was born about 1780 but his birth location is not known nor is his ancestry. However, the Nash surname was most commonly found in Great Britain.

Edward Nash was a carpenter by trade and his wife, Hannah, was a homemaker. In addition to Harry, they had Frederick William Nash, born in 1872, and Neva Nash, born in 1875. Both Fred and Neva were born in the Akron, Ohio area, since Edward and Hannah had moved there shortly after 1870.

Fred was a metallurgist and mining engineer and we know from passport records that he traveled to Mexico at least once to pursue his occupation. Fred married Violet Irene Preston in 1901 in Denver, and together they had two daughters, Virginia and Consuelo. Violet was born in Denver in 1877. Before 1910, Fred and Neva moved to San Diego and stayed there the rest of their lives.

Family lore has it that Fred owned a company, Bullfrog Marble and Mining Quarry, and was killed in a car “accident”. His partner in the company then stole it from Violet and her daughters and left them penniless.

Neva was an “old maid” school teacher and never married. Although she was born in Ohio, she moved back to her father's home area, Massachusetts, and taught school there for many years before retiring to St. Petersburg, Florida. At least once she traveled to Cuba on holiday.

Although Harry was born in Massachusetts, he was taken by his father and mother to Ohio when he was about two years old. Because the 1890 Census was lost, we don't know where the family was in that era. There is no evidence that Edward or Hannah ever traveled to Colorado so Harry may have struck out on his own.

As we know, Harry married Susan Pearl Miller in 1891, in the Trinidad, Colorado area. At the time, he was 22 and she was 14, four months short of her 15^th birthday. It is likely that Fred followed his older brother, Harry, to Colorado since he married Violet there in 1901.

Harry and Susan had three children, Arletta Florence born in 1893, Edward Everett (his grandfather's namesake) born in 1894, and Sedelia born in 1897. All three of these children were born in Las Animas County in the Trinidad area.

In June, 1898, when their youngest child Sedelia was about 8 months old, Susan deserted Harry and moved to Pitkin County in the Aspen area. The whereabouts of the three children during this period are unknown. In July, 1899, Harry was awarded a divorce from Susan on the grounds of desertion. No mention of the three children was made in the divorce papers; it is assumed that they had been abandoned.

In July, 1900, Susan married Richard Leace Young in Grand Junction, Colorado. She and Richard had another ten to fifteen children, the exact number is unknown. In her obituary, it was stated that she was the mother of eighteen children. Some time around 1924, she divorced Richard and married James Adair. They had no children together. Susan died in 1939 in Twin Falls, Idaho at the age of 62.

At the time of Harry's divorce from Susan, he had moved to the Denver area, in Arapahoe County. He died in 1902 at the age of 33 and is buried at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia. At the time of death, Harry's occupation was listed as “labourer”.

Harry Nash Revealed

Well, it's been a long time since I've put anything on this blog - almost a year in fact.  Why?  Because I have had writer's block.  That's code for being lazy.

Yesterday, after seventeen years of frustration, I finally found out where my great grandfather Harry Nash came from.  I first wrote about Harry in April, 2013, listing him as one of my failures in genealogy.  He has certainly been an enigma - I've been able to trace back every one of my ancestors for several generations except for him.

My grandfather was Edward Everett Nash.  He was born just before the turn of the twentieth century (1894) and saw a lot of hard times.  His parents abandoned him when he was a small child and he lived in orphanages until he was 12 or 13.  At that time he struck out on his own.

Ed's mother was Susan Pearl Miller, my great grandmother.  She had 18 children by two different husbands and, as far as we can tell, didn't raise any of them!  For several years, I've been able to research her family and have met a bunch of cousins.  I have a pretty clear picture of her life although I never met her.

Susie Pearl's mother was Martha Jane Duncan and her father was Daniel D. Miller.  The other day I was browsing the LDS website, FamilySearch, and found that we can trace the Duncans back to about 950 A.D.  In fact, my 30th great grandfather was Duncan I, King of Scotland.  He was murdered by Macbeth in order that Macbeth might assume the crown.  Macbeth, of course, was the subject of the play by William Shakespeare.

But I digress.  The subject of this blog is my Grandfather Ed's father, Harry Nash.  Because Granddad was abandoned, he never knew much about his parents.  In fact, family lore tells us that Ed only met his father once when he was about 13 or 14 and working on a ranch in Arizona.  A man rode up to him and asked Ed if he knew who he was.  When he replied that he didn't, the man told him that he was Ed's father.

As I stated earlier, I've been searching for some information on Harry Nash for seventeen years.  Every lead I've ever followed was either wrong or inconclusive.  It's ironic that only yesterday morning, I told my wife, Louise, that I certainly hoped to solve that riddle before I died.  Then, by yesterday evening, much of it was solved!

I was going through some DNA matches for my aunt Edith when I found a new match named Jeffrey Pepper.  He was a good match to her but not to any of Aunt Edith's other family lines.  I thought that he must surely be descended from the Nash's.  I sent him an email and, within an hour, he responded telling me that his great grandfather was indeed a Nash.

With the information he gave me I went to work on Ancestry.com and quickly found his great grandfather, Frederick W. Nash.  A little more digging and I found that he had a brother, Harry W. Nash.  This Harry was born about the same time as my great grandfather had reportedly been born but in Massachusetts, not Michigan as the family had believed for years.

I was beginning to feel certain that this was the right trail and when I learned Harry and Fred's father's name, I was sure.  It was Edward Everett Nash, exactly the same name as my grandfather!  In a matter of a couple of hours, I had gone from knowing nothing about Harry Nash to having a pretty good understanding of them.

It's almost kind of a letdown to know that the mystery is solved.  I've chased it for so long and now it's over, sort of.  There is still a lot we don't know about Harry, specifically what happened to him after he and my great grandmother separated.

Jeff Pepper has promised to send me more information about the family and I'm anxious to get started on researching more of Harry's background.