The daughter of James Ryan and Amelia Norman, Harriett was born and baptized on March 29, 1834 in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin, in the Irish midlands town of Kildare. Around 1856 she married Michael Mason, and they had a daughter named Amelia, born in 1857 in the town of Celbridge, just west of Dublin. In early 1858, all three, along with Harriett's younger brother Andrew Ryan, embarked for a new life in the United States, a journey that would have begun with a ship crossing of the Irish Sea from Dublin to Liverpool. There they likely had to wait several nights in one of the port city's filthy, overcrowded lodging houses until they were allowed to board their ship, the "Calhoun," piloted by Captain Daniel H. Truman. Berthed in the lower decks, they were just four of more than 460 total passengers, several of whom did not survive the voyage. Departing from Liverpool in late April for a crossing that typically took about 35 days, they arrived in New York City on May 18.

From there Harriett and Michael made their way to northwestern Pennsylvania, where they appeared on the 1860 census living in Waterford, about 15 miles from the southern shore of Lake Erie, with Michael working as a laborer. They had three more children during their years in Pennsylvania: Elizabeth, Harriett, and John. Soon after John's birth in 1868 they headed west once more and spent some time in Chicago, where their son James was born around 1869. By 1870 they had settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where daughter Mary was born in 1872, and around 1874 they moved west to Platte County, where their seventh and final child, daughter Alice, was most likely born.

Michael tragically died around 1874, at about the age of 39. Harriett married their neighbor and fellow Irish immigrant, Martin Bohen, on January 29, 1876 in St. John's Catholic Church of Columbus, Nebraska. She and Martin had two children together: Martin Joseph and William Michael Bohen. They moved to the Los Angeles area around 1892, first farming in Downey before Harriett and Martin retired to Redondo Beach, where they spent the rest of their lives. How many of Harriett's children made the move with them to California is unclear, but seven ended up settling in the Golden State, while only two settled elsewhere; Elizabeth stayed in Nebraska with her husband and children, and James, a conductor on the Union Pacific railroad, moved to Wyoming around the same time the Bohens moved to California.

Harriett, according to the grandchildren who remembered her, never lost her thick Irish brogue.