Biographical information provided by Stefanie Lash, Archives New Zealand, for the He Tohu exhibition:
Grace McWilliam was born in Hampden, North Otago in 1864. She was the only daughter of John and Barbara, Scottish migrants who had married in Otago in 1862. Her father died when she was three, and her mother married George Murray, a widower with five children.
In 1888 Grace married William Dunbar, a farmer and fellow Scot in Hampden, and together they had four daughters and two sons. One son, Joseph, died when he was four after being badly burned when his nightshirt caught fire. Her second son, John David Dunbar, died at the age of 24 in one of the final defences of the Somme in April 1918, only seven months before the end of the First World War. Grace’s four daughters lived into their eighties.
Grace herself died in 1933, at the age of 62, at her home Awamoa near Oamaru.