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.
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