Nancy's father died when she was six years old. She and her mother, Sarah, then went to live with Sarah's father, John Oxford and during this time  Sarah died in 1859 so John Oxford kept Nancy to raise. John Oxford died around 1868 so Nancy was then raised by one of her O'Neal aunts.

 As told by Mary Malissa Autry Leverette
 In the late 1860s, Nancy visited one of her Oxford aunts in Moultrie, Ga. During the journey back home and just a few miles out from Moultrie, a rabbit  scared the coach's horses and thinking that the coachman could not hold the horses, she jumped from the coach only to have the coach's wheel roll  over and crush her ankle.¹ The Doctor set the broken ankle wrong and from that time on Nancy's foot was such as to make one think of a club foot.  One of her Oxford uncles became so mad at the doctor for this that he grabbed his shotgun and went after the doctor. I was told it took six men to  hold him down and to disarm him. It was during this period of convalescence in Moultrie, when Nancy met William Jasper Leverett, what the occasion  was grandma couldn't remember.

 From that time on, Nancy Leverett would only wear floor length dresses and her later life ended with her having to use crutches every where she went.  According to Aunt Hilda and Aunt Lena, Nancy could move as fast using one crutch as they could with two good legs and feet.

 As told by Aunt Hilda Parcell and Aunt Lena Edwards
 Another of her Oxford(?) aunts, an old maid, who lived in Moultrie, went to the St. Louis Worlds Fair in the 1890s with an old maid neighbor and  disappeared. The family, after the St. Louis Police were unabled to find her, hired the Pinkerton Agency. They were able to trace the aunt's arrival at  the train depot in St. Louis, talk to the Red Cap who accompanied them to the hotel, the desk clerk and the bell hop who took their luggage to their  room. Once they were in their room, they were never seen again. The Pinkertons told the family that the St Louis Police had told them that over one  hundred bodies, each day of the Worlds Fair, were found floating down the river, and they believed it was impossible for anyone to identify the aunt if  she was one of those bodies.