♂Morris Beauchamp Harvey

Morris Beauchamp Harvey (4 September 1896 – 20 June 1993) was an Illinois-born rancher and lawman of San Luis Obispo County, California, who was captain of the sheriff’s substation at San Miguel during the Second World War. After his father died of tuberculosis in New Mexico in 1908, his mother married his father’s elder brother, James William Harvey, who raised him in California. He was a nephew of Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his father Orian Ross Harvey (1870–1908), her youngest brother.

Early life

He was born on 4 September 1896 in Wabash County, Illinois, the second son of Orian Ross Harvey and Anne Overby Brennan (1874–1965), who had married at Mount Carmel in 1893 at the house of his grandfather, the physician James Harvey. His elder brother was James Orian Harvey (1895–1988), and a sister, Anne Eleanore, followed. His father, a farmer, died of tuberculosis on 3 June 1908 at Deming, New Mexico, where his brother James was then living, and the Mount Carmel paper reported that he left “three children — two boys and a girl.”

By 1910 the widowed Anne had married her late husband’s brother, and the census of that year found the household at Lakeside, San Diego County, California: James W. and Anna O. Harvey, her three children by Orian, and a baby, Esther Ross Harvey (1910–2006), whose middle name, Ross, was the name Orian had gone by. The census listed Morris, then 13, as the head’s son; James was in fact both his uncle and his stepfather. A family memorial written for his own son later recalled that the family had at one time owned two city blocks in San Diego for a dairy and had to leave them when Balboa Park was built; that account rests on the memorial alone. In 1920 Morris, aged 23 and single, was still living with his mother and stepfather at Oakdale, Stanislaus County.

Marriage and ranching

He served in the United States Navy; his obituary does not give the dates, and the same family memorial calls him a veteran of the First World War. In 1925, by the date a cemetery memorial gives, he married Thelma Annette Kellogg (1896–1961), a native of Goleta, Santa Barbara County. They had three children, the eldest of them Ross Elmore Harvey (1929–2017), whose birth record names his father as a native of Keensburg, Illinois. The census of 1930 found the couple and their infant son at Heber in the Imperial Valley, and by 1931 or 1932 they had moved to San Luis Obispo County, where they made their home for many years on the Panorama ranch in the Union district of the county. The census of 1950 lists him there as a farmer.

His obituary records a varied working life alongside the ranch. While Camp Roberts, the Army training post near San Miguel, was being built, he worked as its head of security; during the Second World War he was captain of the sheriff’s substation at San Miguel; and he also worked for an automobile club, placing signs along the roads. He was a member of the Farm Bureau.

Later life

Thelma died suddenly in a Paso Robles hospital on 16 May 1961 and was buried at Goleta. About 1968 he married Daisy A. Withrow (died 1997), a native of the county who had been married before under the name Van Dam; his obituary in 1993 called her his “wife of 25 years”. He retired to Atascadero, and died at Paso Robles on 20 June 1993, aged 96, survived by his wife, his three children and his two sisters. He was buried on 24 June 1993 in the Paso Robles District Cemetery.

Notes

His birth date comes from his Social Security and California death records; the censuses of 1900 to 1930 give ages that point to 1897, and his son’s birth record gives 1897. His birthplace is given variously as Rochester (the family record), Keensburg (his son’s birth record, 1929) and Mount Carmel (his obituary), all in Wabash County, Illinois. A California marriage index places his second marriage in Kern County on 19 August 1967, a year earlier than the obituary’s reckoning.