Nancy Jane (Shaw) Anderson

Nancy Jane Shaw was born in 1834 and died in 1910, age 76. She married Reverend Abraham Ramsey Anderson around 1860 in Washington, Pennsylvania; their wedding-year double portrait (by J. S. Young of Washington, Pennsylvania) preserves what Maggie Eesley’s catalogue called “a couple anticipating a long marriage blessed with six children.”

A higher-resolution scan of that wedding-year frame arrived in this archive in June 2026 from Chuck’s keeping. She stands at her young husband’s right shoulder — in a dark bell-sleeved dress with a white collar at the throat, hair pulled up; he is seated beside her in a dark suit, vest, and the long Presbyterian-clerical beard he would carry through his five-decade ministry. The studio frame is the kind of formal portrait a recently-married couple in Washington County, Pennsylvania would have sat for in the first months of the Civil War.

Together they raised six children, one of whom was Alice Anderson McMaster (1871–1961), Chuck’s great-grandmother.

The second photograph, dated 1888, shows her in her sixties, taken by Morris of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Maggie’s catalogue note on the chair she rests her hand on in that frame, with a wry editorial:

This detail appears on the chair upon which Nancy Jane Shaw Anderson’s hand rests. It seems odd that the wife of a well-respected minister would rest her hand upon such a graphic display of a battle between a lion and a naked man.

Whether the chair was an heirloom, a studio prop, or simply unremarked-on furniture from the era, it is the kind of detail Maggie’s archival eye preserved without judgment, and worth keeping in the record for that reason alone.

She is Chuck’s great-great-grandmother along the same line as her husband.

Sources: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); deck IDs ARA_NJSA001 en (with husband, 1860, by J. S. Young, Washington PA) and NJSA en (alone in her sixties, 1888, by Morris, Pittsburg PA).