[1] She worked to reconstruct a lost manuscript on the history of Tahiti written by her grandfather, English missionary John Muggridge Orsmond, by using his original notes.

William Henry had been part of the first contingent of the London Missionary Society to arrive on the ship Duff in 1797.

[2][3][4][5] Raised on Tahiti, she was educated at the missionary school run by William Howe and his wife in Papeete.

[6][7][8] Henry's maternal grandfather Orsmond had collected significant amounts of oral histories, genealogy, myths, folklore and traditional knowledge such as astronomy and navigation while living in Tahiti between 1817 and his death in 1856.

In 1848, he had presented a manuscript about the history of Tahiti to French colonial official Charles François Lavaud, but it was lost before it could be published in Paris.