Nancy Salina Kelly
Nancy Salina Kelly, always called Nannie, was born on 16 April 1876 at Wenas, in Yakima County, Washington Territory. Her parents, Thomas Kelly and Christina Elizabeth Sunderland, had come up from Portland in 1871 and taken land in the Wenas country twelve miles northwest of what became North Yakima. She and her younger brother Wilbur were the only children of the family born in Yakima County; the older ones were born in Oregon. Her sisters were Martha, Sena, Lura and Minnie, and her brothers included Henry, Albert and Wilbur.
In July 1878, when Nannie was two, a rumor that hostile bands were coming sent the Wenas and Selah settlers into a dirt breastwork thrown up around John Cleman's cabin. About eighty people gathered there. The Kelly family was among them.
On 4 August 1890 Nannie married Zenas Bolton, a rancher about twenty-five years her senior. She was fourteen, and her father wrote out his consent on the license application. A photograph taken for the wedding shows her in a dark dress with a row of buttons and a white collar, her curly hair cut short.
She and Zenas raised their children in the Wenas valley: Claudie, who died as a baby in 1895, Theresa Eunice, Asa Simeon, Wilbur Zenas and the twins Homer Daniel and Virgil Thomas. Zenas died on 8 August 1918. In 1920 Nannie was a widow in the Simcoe precinct with Asa, Wilbur, Homer and Virgil still at home.
In her last years she lived on a star route outside Wapato. She died there on 8 May 1941, aged 65, after a cerebral hemorrhage. Her son Asa's wife gave the particulars for her death certificate, which named her parents as Thomas Kelly of Kentucky and Christina Sunderland. She was buried at Wenas on 10 May 1941, beside Zenas, under a stone that reads MOTHER NANNIE S. 1876 1941.
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Nancy Salina Kelly (1876-1941)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nancy-salina-kelly-1876-1941-65639e.