Story and photos by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

The writing on the envelope says ‘Grandmother’s letters.’ The writer is Gretchen Briant and her grandmother is Sarah Harris. Inside the envelope, neatly folded, are four typed letters on foolscap, copies of letters written by Sarah from New Plymouth in 1841 and 1843. They describe the family’s voyage from England, the loss of a fourth child and the early days of settlement on the North Taranaki coast. The first three are addressed to Sarah’s father and sisters, who live in Plymouth, Devon. The fourth is addressed to Sarah’s older sister Emma Hill, a school teacher living in Liskeard, Cornwall. The letters must have been precious beyond belief when they arrived in their original form: the first news from New Zealand from a part of the family those in England would never see again.

We have read all four letters as carbon copies at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Extracts from them also appear in My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates, the compendium of writing by 19th century women in Aotearoa New Zealand published by Frances Porter and Charlotte Macdonald in 1996.

But top copies of the letters came to light only recently when Gretchen’s granddaughter in law Judith Briant discovered them late last year at the family home in Marton.

We were delighted to find that the family held top copies of Sarah’s early letters and assumed that they matched the carbons at Turnbull. However, a glance at the letters in Gretchen’s envelope showed that the typings come from different machines and appear on different kinds of paper. Some letters in the envelope are double-spaced and have red margin rules. The Turnbull carbons are all single-spaced and have no margins. What is going on?

To answer the question, even provisionally, means tracing interactions between English and New Zealand parts of the Harris family over more than a century and a half. We present here the upshot of these investigations in the form of a timeline that shows how not one but two sets of Sarah Harris’s letters were typed and distributed among family members in New Zealand.

Images of the typings in Gretchen’s envelope appear in the web feature ‘Grandmother’s letters: Sarah Harris 1841 & 1843‘, with notes on provenance and links to their transcripts in ‘The Family Songbook’ (2019).

Thanks to Goff and Judith Briant for permission to upload another important part of the Harris family papers. Thanks also to Libby Baker for a repeat visit to Puke Ariki to check watermarks and to Brianna Vincent for searching out watermarks and annotations on the letters in Gretchen’s envelope.

View the timeline here, and all of the letters here.