Biographical information provided by Jenni Chrisstoffels, Alexander Turnbull Library, for the He Tohu exhibition:
Henrietta was born in September 1875 in Auckland, the daughter of John and Jane McKaigue, recent immigrants from Ireland. Her two older sisters, Harriet and Ann Eliza, died in the same month, aged just two and four. Three more siblings were born then, some time after the death of John in 1891, the family moved to Dunedin. Henrietta worked as a domestic servant and lived with various family members. In 1917 she married William Alexander Gibb, an accountant, who had been married to Henrietta’s younger sister, Georgina Jane. Georgina had died earlier the same year leaving two teenage children. The Gibb family moved to Australia in the 1930s. Henrietta died in Geelong, Victoria in 1946.