n Hartford, Connecticut on September 6,
1869. His father, Henry Wells Nelson, the nephew of the Reverend E. M.
P. Wells, a pioneer in early Christian social service in Boston, was the
Rector of the Church of The Good Shepherd in Hartford. Before Frank was
ten years old, his father accepted a call to Trinity Church, Geneva, New
York, and there exercised a distinguished ministry for twenty-five
years. Geneva, an attractive college town situated on lovely Seneca
Lake, was an ideal place in which to bring up a family. There were five
children: Margaret, George, Frank, Mary, and Dorothea. George now lives
in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Mary, who married Edward L. Pierce,
lives in Princeton, New Jersey. After the father's retirement, Margaret
and Dorothea lived with their parents in the family home at North
Marshfield, Massachusetts where they still reside. Frank was not a
strong child, but in the freedom and simplicity of the life which a
small town affords, he gained strength rapidly. A sister relates that
he was unusually venturesome, and sometimes horrified timid ladies in
the parish by walking on stilts on open rafters, and by frequenting the
canal, where once he fell in and was pulled out by a bargee. As all boys
do, he roamed the environs of his home with his chums, occasionally
pilfering fruit and getting into all kinds of mischief; but though other
boys might go unpunished because of doting parents, he was always firmly
chastised for his pranks.

The influence of both father and mother upon these strong-minded
children was vital and enduring. The father possessed that happy
combination of gaiety and goodness that commends religion. As he was
deeply and naturally spiritual himself, the expression of religion in
his home and parish was unusually beautiful and appealing. The last
twenty-five years of his life were spent in blindness, but his courage
and his deepened understanding of the ways of God because of this
affliction led him to a thankful acceptance of his limitation; and his
continuing interest in people "made the latter years of his ministry,"
to quote Bishop Lawrence, "as fruitful as the more active ones." His
devoted wife, who was Hortense Chew Lewis of New London, Connecticut,
guided the children through their formative years with skill and
understanding. She was an intelligent mother, discriminating in taste
and judgment. Because of her abounding love of good literature, the
family passed many delightful