On November 20, 1728, Harding married Catherine Neville, the daughter of John Neville (of Furnace, County Kildare) [1] and Elizabeth Riggs. Both the Neville and Riggs families have a long history in Ireland, fully outlined in A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland and elsewhere. Harding is variously described as having lived at Hillbrook or Stillbrooke, which one Parker source suggests is four miles from Kinsale.

Harding was High Sheriff of Cork in 1727 and Mayor of the City in 1740. There is a delightful  story, recounted by the writer, Edith Somerville [2], of Catherine’s efforts to make her way through bad weather to attend the 1740 swearing in of her husband.

Catherine…married Mr. Harding Parker, who was made Mayor of Cork in the year of the great frost, 1740. It was a terrible frost. Dorothea Herbert in her Retrospections, says that “Brandy froze before the fire, and the Woodcocks and other wild birds flew into the house for shelter.” The roads for horses were impossible, even the rivers were frozen. Mrs. Harding Parker was at Shippool, and Shippool is some twenty miles from Cork. But…Aunt Catherine was of a generation that didn't stick at trifles, and if horses were not available, men were inexpensive substitutes (with wages at four pence a day). Mrs. Parker's great-niece, Mrs. Mary Belcher (nee Somerville) writes, quietly and without comment: “I heard that my Aunt Catherine was taken from Shippool to Cork in a handchair, by men, when her husband was sworn in.” 

To have undertaken and survived such a journey, at necessarily a foot's pace, and in such a temperature, implies for Great-Aunt Catherine a remarkable determination to see the fun and a high quality of conjugal devotion as well as the constitution of a polar bear.

Realising this, it is comparatively easy to believe that she lived to considerably over the age of ninety. (Edith OEnone Somerville and Boyle Townsend Somerville. Records of the Somerville Family of Castlehaven & Drishane from 1174 to 1940.  Cork: Guy & Co., 1940.)





Another description of Catherine, by an unknown author, is recounted below.

My old Aunt Catherine, married to Harding Parker, lived with his good son at Passage on my first visits to Cork. Mr. Parker was very affectionate to all our family. I was often at his house and delighted to sit in my old Aunt's drawing-room, read the Bible and good books to her, and hear much of former days and relations I had never seen. She was a very handsome old lady, always had a real shawl on, as one of her sons died a General in the East-India Company's service, another was Captain of an India-Man. They sent many presents of value to her and all the family. One of her Daughters was married to Sir Henry Martin, who had the situation of Commissioner of the Dockyards at Portsmouth, and most attentive to any Irish friends in the navy who went there.  (O'Hegarty, P.S.  The Somervilles and Their Connexions in Cork, JCHAS vol. XLVII (second series) [ns] 1942)

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[1] Burke, Bernard. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland. London: 1912, p. 512.

[2] Edith Somerville had connections to the Parker Family via a Parker/Somerville marriage.