[6] When Ward was one year old, the family moved closer to Chicago, to Cass, now known as Downers Grove, Illinois about twenty-three miles from Lake Michigan.

The family then moved to a homestead in nearby St. Charles, Illinois where Ward's father built a saw mill business making railroad ties.

He was known as Frank Ward to his classmates and friends and showed a great enthusiasm for books and learning, liberally supplementing his education with outside reading.

[5] Four years after Ward started attending school, his parents, along with Lester and an older brother, Erastus, traveled to Iowa in a covered wagon for a new life on the frontier.

[5] The business failed, however, and Lester Frank, who still didn't have the money to attend college, found a job teaching in a small country school; in the summer months he worked as a farm laborer.

At that time almost all of the basic research in such fields as geography, paleontology, archaeology and anthropology were concentrated in Washington, DC, and a job as a federal government scientist was a prestigious and influential position.

According to Edward Rafferty, Ward was part of a group of "Washington intellectuals" who "wanted to place social science within the structure of government and public life itself".

[11] Ward believed that centering research activity in government actions would benefit democratic progress, and evade the partisanship, corruption, and conflict of post-Civil War politics.

[16] From 1891 to 1905, Ward continued to publish numerous texts on natural history and sociology, with the circulation of his work in both areas contributing to his growing notability.

In 1905, American sociologists debated the creation of an independent professional association that would be distinct from other existing collectives for historians, economists, and political scientists.

[17] Ward became the first president of the American Sociological Association on December 28, 1905, after his colleauges Ross, Small, and Giddings motioned for him to receive the honor.

[26] Prominent social scientists including Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tonnies, Patrick Geddes, Thorstein Veblen, and Albion Small mourned his death.

[26] His colleagues at Brown University eulogized Ward as a "profound student, and an original investigator in the most abstruse problems which the human mind can grapple", describing him as "a genial associate" and "an inspiring teacher".

[31] Lizzie assisted him in editing and contributing to a newsletter called The Iconoclast, dedicated to free thinking and critiquing organized religion.

[35] Emily Palmer Cape wrote that Ward "always stressed the power of an education which teaches a knowledge of the materials and forces of nature, and their relation to our own lives.

[37] Cyrenus Ward went on to join Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the International Workingmen's Association, to which he was elected a council member, before being arrested as a spy during the Franco-Prussian War.

[37] Lester Ward detailed Cyrenus' activities in The Iconoclast, and went on to secure jobs for him at the Geological Survey and the Bureau of Statistics via his network in Washington.

[38] Ward hoped to use his scientific literacy to contribute an American version of historical-materialist Sociology, opposing the then popular work of Herbert Spencer with critique inspired by Karl Marx.

[42] Ward had a lifelong interest in nature, beginning in childhood and extending throughout his time as a government clerk active in local biological societies, and as a formally trained paleobiologist.

Reflecting a popular trend at the time, Ward made connections between evolution, patterns in the natural world, and his perspectives on society.

[45] Ward believed that "the universal comprehension of nature" would lead to a situation where "every human could do his part", stressing that recognising this interconnectedness and interdependence "should inspire one to add to the whole" and to "contribute one's share ot life's great continuous flow.

[47] From Ward's perspective, conflict enabled the rise of Homo Sapiens over other creatures, and saw the expansion of what he considered to be more technologically advanced races and nations.

Ward argued that those critical of the development of a social safety as 'paternalistic' were hypocritical for themselves receiving "relief from their own incompetency" in their private enterprise as capitalists and industrialists.

[61] Eric Royal Lybeck argues that the broadness of Ward's research was responsible for his work being "shunted from the centre of sociological discourse to the margins of posterity"[62] While Ward's work was wide sweeping and attempted to synthesize insights from a broad spectrum of research themes and subjects, the institutionalization of sociology in the United States led to a hyperfocus on discrete and specialized problems which was at odds with the scale of his approach.

[63] It was Small's assessment that Ward clung to a "pure science" approach in social research, and was more of a "museum investigator" interested in labeling, categorising, and developing schema.

[63] Cumulatively, this meant that while Ward was "highly regarded and influential" in the early history of sociology in the United States, his approach and contributions rapidly became redundant as the field changed.

[64] Even during his lifetime, C. W. A. Veditz suggested that due to translation and wide circulation, Ward's works may have been better known in Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia, and Japan than they were in the United States.