Elsie M. Knapp was born in the 1850s in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to Alden and Orpha Knapp. Her father was a farmer who owned $600 of real estate by 1860. She grew up and attended school in St. Johnsbury, and she married William Wallace Harvey on July 5, 1870. Their daughter Elsie was born around 1873. They lived in Plainfield, New Hampshire, and her husband worked as a painter. They moved to Readfield, Maine, in the late 1800s, and then to Springfield, Massachusetts, in the early 1900s. Her husband died on May 22, 1911, and she returned to St. Johnsbury in the 1910s. According to a local writer, she “conduct[ed] a home hospital and car[ed] for the sick.” She moved to Wilson, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, and she died there on September 30, 1927.