Frank Howard Nelson was born in 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.