The Harris Connection (Part 1) Meet William and Mary Harris (born Heard)

Welcome to my version of our family history. Do feel free to copy anything you like and share it amongst your family connections. Do feel free to contact me or leave a message, especially if you can clarify, correct or confirm any of the information.  Where possible, I will give links  or acknowledgement of sources. This blog is a way of accumulating and sorting my family research so I can create fuller and more coherent picture of our ancestors in the context of their life and times.  Check out the Descendants of William and Mary Harris Facebook page, and feel free to join, and share and compare your information and photos. 

Meet William and Mary Harris - my great-great grandparents.  

They married in 1847 and arrived in New Zealand in 1858. 

Much more information to come later - this is just a brief introduction. 

William and Mary Harris, most likely pre-1857, before they left Cornwall for New Zealand. 
  

The photo above was in my grandmother's photo album (which would have belonged originally to her father, Richard Harris, Mary's youngest child - or it might even have been William and Mary's photo album). I didn't know who they were until I matched it against the two individual portraits(see below)  which hung on my grandmother's wall (and now my wall) and saw the similarities. The Canadian Studio mark on the frame is most likely to have been from a copy made of the original portrait, as Canadian photography studios were in Auckland around the turn of the century.  Note the outline of a frame in the top left curve just above William's head, indicating that this is a photo of a portrait. Perhaps it was taken so all family members could have a copy?  I wonder what happened to the original portrait? I wonder if anyone else has a copy of this in their family photo collection? 

 If this was taken before they left England in 1857, it would have been in the earliest days of photography. I wonder how they could have afforded it?   Mary, in particular, looks very young - and petite -  and they had already been married for ten years by the time they came to NZ. Would they have been able to afford this photo in their early days in New Zealand?   The clues are obviously in the clothing, so might need some expert knowledge on that to  give it a time frame.  

Mary Harris nee Heard. This is a snapshot taken of Mary's photo, found in my grandmother's photo album  This photo would have been taken in New Zealand. Her son Richard had this photos enlarged and coloured, and the interesting  hat was  "photoshopped" off Mary's head. He also had the interesting marks removed from behind her head. I wonder if this was a miniature taken from a larger photo?  She still looks quite young - not the same age as William (below) and there is only two years difference in their age

William Harris - This was the original from which a larger coloured portrait was commissioned by my great grandfather.  It used to hang on the bedroom wall at my grandmother's and used to scare me when I headed off to bed under his unblinking thin-lipped glare.  "What rot!" my grandmother would scoff unsympathetically. "You want to be more afraid of the living than the dead!" (Sounds like something William might have said to her as a grandchild?)