Miss Elizabeth Dunbar Masson
and Miss Annie Dunbar Masson
(1830-1919 and 1832-1899)
23 June 1862

[The following month, on 24 July 1862, the two women returned to Silvy’s studio and were photographed again in the same set (volume 8, page 303, sitting number 10,832), this time with their mother, Mrs Margaret Dunbar Masson.]

There had once been a third sister, the youngest of the three, Katherine (‘Kate’) Ferrier Masson, born in Blackheath on 12 June 1834, but she died on 26 October 1860 at 50 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater (Nairnshire Telegraph, 31 October 1860). Her mother subsequently paid for a church to be built at Stuttgart as a memorial to her dead daughter. The Church of St Katherine at Stuttgart was consecrated by the Bishop of Honolulu in 1868 (Bury and Norwich Post, 1 September 1868).

Mrs Dunbar Masson did not live to see the completion of the church she had financed. On 24 December 1867 the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette reported that ‘On Sunday last, Mrs Dunbar Masson, sister of the late Mr Duncan Dunbar, residing at No 50, Porchester-terrace, broke a blood-vessel, and died very shortly afterwards. She inherited the princely fortune left by the late Mr D. Dunbar.’ Mrs Dunbar Masson’s estate was valued at £16,000. Although this was a considerable sum, it was only a fraction of the £1,000,000 her brother had left only five years earlier.