Robert Murray was born on December 25, 1832, in Earltown, Colchester County, Nova Scotia.
He was an editor and author. In 1857, he graduated from the Old Free Church College in Halifax and was appointed editor of The Presbyterian Witness and Evangelical Advocate of Halifax in 1855. In 1858, he received a licence to preach from the Free Church of Nova Scotia, but he was not ordained a minister. Between 1861 and 1875 he was also editor of the monthly Home and Foreign Record of the Presbyterian Church of the Lower Provinces of British North America. He also contributed a series of amusing portraits of Nova Scotia politicians and numerous articles from his journeys across Canada and abroad, and on various literary, social, economic, and scientific subjects. He was secretary for the Halifax Evangelical Alliance, an advocate of the free common school system in Nova Scotia, and one of the early members of the Dalhousie University Board of Governors, receiving an honorary LL.D. from Dalhousie in 1902. Murray was also a poet. He wrote the hymn "From Ocean Unto Ocean" as well as a Canadian stanza to "God Save the Queen".
In 1867, he married Elizabeth Carey (1835–1920). He died on December 12, 1910, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

R. Murray was the secretary of the Y.M.C.A. in Halifax. He lived at 128 Barrington Street.

Mary Rigby Murray was the wife of the Scottish judge John Archibald, Lord Murray.

Margaret Smith Polson, founder of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, was born in Paisley, Scotland and married Scottish philosopher John Clark Murray in 1865. The couple moved to Kingston, Ontario, where her husband had been offered the post of professor of philosophy. In 1872 he accepted an appointment at McGill University and the family, now with three small children, headed to Montreal. Margaret began meeting with a small group of socially conscious women and in 1875 they founded the Montreal Young Women’s Christian Association. She began to write articles on social issues and in 1891 founded and edited a short-lived illustrated children’s magazine, the Young Canadian. While visiting England in 1899, at the height of the Boer War, she became inspired with the idea of a patriotic fund-raising association to support soldiers’ families and care for war graves. She worked all through the following year organizing chapters of the Federation of Daughters of the Empire across Canada, with headquarters in Montreal. The Toronto branch of the Victoria League, formed in England in 1901, claimed that the Federation was in competition with their organization; the bitter feud that ensured ended up involving Lady Minto, the wife of the governor-general. The Toronto chapter took over leadership and became the headquarters with the new name of Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, but the feud continued. Nevertheless, when Margaret died in 1927, there were 650 chapters in Canada and some of the other colonies.

Sir John Murray was born on December 18, 1851, in London, England, the eldest son of John Murray (1808–1892) who was the third of his name to be head in a succession of the publishing house founded in 1768 by John Murray the first, who was followed by John Murray the second (1778–1843). Publishing, therefore, was to him a hereditary profession, and in due course, he became John Murray the Fourth.

He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and then entered the firm's house in Albemarle Street, passing through all its departments until, in 1892, he succeeded his father as its head. In 1917, Murray's house acquired the publishing business of Smith, Elder & Co., and this enabled him, late in life, to take a personal interest in many of the younger school of novelists. From 1922 until he died in 1928, he edited the Quarterly Review and surveyed politics from an interested and yet detached point of view. In Byron, Murray took a hereditary interest, editing his Correspondence in 1922; and it was in honour of the Byron centenary in 1924 that he received the D.Ph. degree from the University of Athens and was created a commander of the order of the Redeemer (of Greece). In recognition of his publication of the first and second series of volumes of the Letters of Queen Victoria, he was created C.V.O. in 1912 and K.C.V.O. in 1926. He found time not only to edit Gibbon's Autobiography (1897) and to write John Murray III: a Memoir (1919), but to be chairman of the Publishers' Association from 1898 to 1899. He also acted as Justice of Peace in London and was a member of the board of the Hospital for Sick Children and its vice-president.

In 1878, he married Katherine Evelyn Leslie (1858–1938). He died on November 30, 1928, in Hove, Sussex, England.

John Ralph Murray received a B.A. in 1883 and a B.C.L. in 1886, both from McGill University. He served as President of the McGill Undergraduate Literary Society, 1881/82, President of the Lawn Tennis Club, 1882/83, was a member of the editorial committee for the first edition of the University Gazette,1882, belonged to the Imperial Federation League in 1885 and served as Secretary to the McGill Graduates' Society in 1886. During his academic life he was an outstanding student.

John Clark Murray, philosopher and teacher, was born in Paisley, Scotland, the son of David Murray, later provost of Paisley, and Mary Clark of the thread-manufacturing family. He studied philosophy at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh (1850-1856, 1859) under Sir William Hamilton, premier representative of the optimistic and humanistic theist tradition of the Scott ish Enlightenment. After a period of study at Heidelberg and Gottingen, he was appointed Professor of philosophy at Queen's College,
Kingston. He taught there from 1862 to 1871, when he moved to McGill where he was to remain as Frothingham Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy until his retirement in 1903.

Murray was consciously committed to transplanting the philosophical viewpoint of the Scottish Enlightenment to a Canadian context, although in an independent and critical spirit. His published works - six books and about 125 articles - diffused this optimistic and liberal outlook not only on abstract matters of psychology and ethics, but on a wide range of social and political issues. Two questions claimed his particular attention: capital and labour, and the status of women. It was over the issue of coeducation that his clash with J.W. Dawson took place in 1888. Murray was married to Margaret Poulson Murray, founder of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. He passed away in 1917.