Susan Morehead Boyd Harris

By Linda Thompson Robertson © may 2007

Susan (“Sue”) Morehead Boyd was the youngest daughter and the fifth child of James Hervey and Eliza Boyd. She was born December 17, 1857.

Eliza Ellis Boyd had a sister named Susan (Susannah, called “Sue”) who married Josephus Ledbetter and lived near the Boyd family on North Street. It may be that Susan Boyd was named for her aunt, Susan Ellis Ledbetter. Eliza Ellis Boyd’s mother was Sarah Morehead before she married James Ellis, and hence the middle name Morehead.

On August 26, 1880, Sue Boyd married Benjamin Goodrich Harris, a Texan, at the Boyd home. The Reverend John Hunter, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Jackson, officiated. The Harrises moved to Mineola, Texas, a railroad town.

Less than a year later, on July 30 or 31, 1881, Sue died in childbirth at the age of only twenty-three. She was buried in the Boyd plot at Greenwood Cemetery, Jackson. The baby was a girl named Susan (“Sue”) Boyd Harris, born July 30, 1881.  She attended high school in Fort Worth, Texas, graduating on May 31, 1898.

In 1900, eighteen-year-old Susan Harris was living in Fort Worth, Texas, with her grandmother, her father’s mother, Virginia (Harris) Scoble, an Alabama native, and her husband Andrew W. Scoble, a master machinist from England, and daughter, Virginia Scoble Ford, a widow.

Subsequently, Sue Boyd Harris married Dr. Louis Amos Klein, a native of Pennsylvania, ten years her senior. Dr. Klein’s mother was Mary Shoemaker Klein of Philadelphia (born January 1849).

Dr. Klein was Dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania from 1910 to 1930. In 1910, Sue and Louis Klein lived in Prospect Park Borough, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. They had a daughter, Mary Virginia Klein, who was eight years old at the time. She had been born in Texas.  Mary Virginia later married Harry E. Rule, a native of Latvia.

In 1913, Sue Boyd Harris Klein joined the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR National Number 102717). She gave her address as 107 Poplar Street, Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. According to DAR records, she eventually joined under the names of five ancestors: (1) Lt. Col. Benjamin Birdsall of Duchin County, New York; (2) Capt. Samuel Harris, Captain of Cavalry; (3) Capt. Thomas Lee of New York; (4) John Boyd, Scout and Ranger in Virginia; and (5) Capt. Turner Morehead, 3rd Virginia Regiment, Fauquier County, Virginia. It is clear she knew of her Boyd and Ellis/Morehead connections, the ancestors of the mother she never knew.

In 1920, Sue Klein’s address was 1441 Clifton Street, NW, Washington, D.C. In 1930, Sue and Louis Klein lived on Chestnut Lane in Nether Providence, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Living with them was Ida Lee Hinges Harris, described as “mother-in-law” and “widowed” on the census form. Ida Lee must have been Benjamin Harris’s second wife.

Sue Klein died in March of 1980, when she was ninety-eight years old. Her last residence was in Media, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.