Harriet and her sister Sarah were probably not twins, but their births were close to each other: little more than a year. Harriet was born circa 1795, at Dedham, the daughter of Thomas and Sarah Mason. In her father’s will, she is the last daughter to be listed, which suggests she was the youngest.

She was witness to the marriages of her siblings Mary Mason in December 1813 (as there was no minimum age for a witness, this does not help in determining her year of birth: she could have been eighteen, or younger), and those of James Mason and Sarah Mason, both in 1816. She was married herself, to Joseph Anthony Harris at Brightlingsea, on 19 October 1819. Their son Joseph (1820–71) was born the following year.

Harriet’s husband died shortly after, however, and she was married again, to John Jolly (1773–1858), at Brightlingsea on 22 September 1824.

Jolly, twenty years older than Harriet, came from a family of Brightlingsea oyster dredgers and may also have fought in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 (he was born in Brightlingsea, although the Trafalgar records have him as born in Colchester). If this is the case, then he would have had much to talk about with Lazarus Roberts at the Brightlingsea wedding of James Mackenzie Roberts and Phoebe Mason, Harriet’s niece, in 1847. Lazarus definitely attended his son’s wedding: surely Harriet and John Jolly would have too?

By 1851 Harriet (aged fifty-seven) and John were at Spring Road, Brightlingsea, with a servant and their children Harriet (twenty-three), Eliza (twenty) and John William (seventeen and a mariner). Harriet’s son from her first marriage was not forgotten, though. Joseph became a schoolmaster and benefitted to the tune of £100 from his grandfather Thomas Mason’s will, via a codicil of 1837, when he turned twenty-one.

In 1861 Harriet was still at Spring Road, aged sixty-six, but was now widowed. Her daughters both became farmers’ wives. The eldest had married Henry Vincent and when the census was taken that year her younger daughter, Eliza, was visiting her sister and the Vincents at Wivenhoe, Essex, where Henry farmed 220 acres employing twelve men and three boys.

Shortly after, in 1863, Eliza also married a local farmer, George Green Fenn, of Ardleigh. Eliza was living in south London, so the wedding was at St Leonards church, Streatham. They were soon back in Essex though where George worked 250 acres at Rookery Farm, Ardleigh. By 1871 Harriet was boarding with them there. Her age was given as seventy-six.

Harriet died aged seventy-eight, on 27 July 1873 at Ardleigh Rookery, according to a notice in the Ipswich Journal.

Her son John William, an oyster merchant, was also married by the time of her death. He lived at Queen Street, Brightlingsea, and later at Woodbridge Road, Ipswich, with his wife Amelia and a growing family (at least one of whom was given the middle name Mason). His merchant seaman record confirms he was born on 21 July 1833 and describes him as being just four feet ten inches tall (as a fourteen-year-old in 1847), with light hair, fair complexion and hazel eyes. He died in 1913 in Suffolk, aged eighty, possibly the last grandson of Thomas Mason.