Harriet Sarah Hodgkinson

Biography contributed by Dennis Dawson ([email protected]), great great grandson of Harriet Sarah Hodgkinson. 

Harriet Sarah Radford was born in December 1823 in Ashbourne, a small parish and village about 20km north west of Derby in rural Derbyshire. She was the fifth of ten children of Thomas and Sarah Radford. The Radford family were tenant farmers and moderately wealthy by the standards of the day. Harriet was well schooled and literate as evidenced by the weekly annotations in her Bible.

Harriet married John Hodgkinson in Eggington, Derbyshire in November 1843. John and Harriet worked as farmers in Derbyshire before moving to Hendon then just outside of greater London about 1860. They had seven children from 1843 to 1864. In Hendon, John worked as a gardener while Harriet ran a grocery shop. Their son John Hodgkinson, born 1849, emigrated to New Zealand in 1874 where he married and started a large family from which I am descended.

Harriet was widowed when husband John died in London in 1883. Son John had written many letters favourably describing life in the new colony suggesting that his mother join him. Harriet, together with two of her children duly emigrated to New Zealand in 1886.

Harriet, aged 43 on arrival in New Zealand, settled in Napier near John and his growing family. She worked as a nurse and midwife. Nursing was in the very early stages of being a formalised profession in England and most practising nurses, including Harriet were women whose through experience gained valuable health care skills. Midwifery was also not a not a recognised medical profession but a title given to nurses with maternity care skills. Harriet supported the families of her three children living nearby. Harriet lived into her old age in Napier and died there in 1907 aged 83. She was buried in Napier Old Cemetery.

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Harriet Hodgkinson (Family collection)

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