Adah Louise Larned was born on November 19, 1854, in Connecticut to Luman and Samantha Larned. Her father was a carpenter who owned $500 of personal property by 1870. The family moved to Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the 1850s and then to Chicopee, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. She married Benjamin C. Harvey on July 20, 1881, and the couple had no children. They lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, and her husband worked as a cash register agent. They helped care for her elderly father until at least 1900. Her husband died on August 22, 1902, and she spent the next few years teaching school in Montague, Massachusetts. She died in a car accident in Amherst, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1909.