Sitting here, mid-way through another Ohio winter, it's not too difficult to understand why the Evans family would want to pack up and move to California. Looking at the available information, it would seem that climate may have been a deciding factor in sending them westward.
As mentioned in an earlier post, the family was listed on the 1910 census as living in the Hartman Hotel in downtown Columbus. At first glance, it seems unusual that they would have moved from a very nice neighborhood and into a hotel. However, the Hartman was not just a hotel, it was also a sanitarium. Was it possible that one of the family was in poor health? And if so, which one?
A possible answer might be found in an unusual situation. I discovered just this morning that Nelson and his mother are also listed in the 1910 census in Los Angeles. It's unlikely that they headed to California leaving a sick father behind at the sanitarium, so it's a safe bet that either Nelson or his mother was sent to LA to convalesce. Based on the fact that he died young, Nelson would seem the logical choice.
However Nelson didn't stay in Los Angeles very long. He does appear to have started his first film exchange business, the American Feature Film Company, there, as it is mentioned in the Oct- Dec 1912 issue of The Moving Picture World under the Doings at Los Angeles column. But, perhaps feeling better after 3 years in the California sunshine, he headed back to Ohio with his father, continuing his exchange business in Toledo and then Cleveland. The return to Ohio only lasted a couple of years, ending with him moving back to LA by the beginning of 1915 and staying there for the rest of his short life.
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