♂Orian Ross Harvey

Orian Ross Harvey (1870–1908) was a farmer of Mount Carmel, Wabash County, Illinois. He was a son of James Harvey (1821–1896) and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898), and the great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of her great-grandmother Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951).

Marriage and family

He was the youngest of the seven children of the physician James Harvey and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette, all seven of whom are named in his own obituary of 1908. The Mount Carmel Register, which wrote his first name “Orion” and later called him Ross, reported that he was born and raised in the town.

He married Anne Overby Brennan (1874–1965), whom the Register called Anna, at 8 p.m. on Thursday, 11 May 1893. The wedding was held at the house of Dr. James Harvey on West Second Street, most likely his father’s, in the presence of the two families and a few friends, with the Rev. Dr. J. H. Stevenson officiating. His niece Mabel Wilkinson, a daughter of his sister Julia, was maid of honor, and his brother James W. Harvey was best man. The paper said the couple would make their home in Mount Carmel, and in 1900 the census found him there as a farmer. They had two sons, James Orian and Morris Beauchamp, and a daughter, Anne Eleanore.

Death at Deming

The Register reported in June 1908 that he had died of tuberculosis (under the headline “Victim of White Plague”) at Deming, New Mexico, where his brother James was then living. The Register headed its notice “Victim of White Plague”, the old name for the disease. On Thursday, 4 June, his sister’s husband, J. Fred Stein, received a telegram from Deming saying that Ross Harvey had died there on Wednesday, and the paper added that he was buried at Deming, Luna County, New Mexico, that day. He was about 37, and left three children, “two boys and a girl”. The notice named his brothers and sisters as Mrs. J. Fred Stein, Miss Laura Harvey and B. A. Harvey of Mount Carmel, Mrs. Ella White of Chicago, Mrs. R. T. Wilkinson of Ravia, Oklahoma, and James Harvey of Deming.

Notes

The telegram makes the death Wednesday, 3 June 1908; a New Mexico death index gives 4 June, which is the day of the burial. The tree’s year for his birth, 1870, agrees with the notice’s “about 37 years”.

The notice of the wedding does not say how Dr. James Harvey was related to the groom. It names the best man separately as Mr. James W. Harvey, and “the two families” attended, so the host was most likely the groom’s father, but that is an inference.