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Below is a family biography included in Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Chautauqua County, New York published by John M. Gresham & Co. in 1891.  These biographies are valuable for genealogy research in discovering missing ancestors or filling in the details of a family tree. Family biographies often include far more information than can be found in a census record or obituary.  Details will vary with each biography but will often include the date and place of birth, parent names including mothers' maiden name, name of wife including maiden name, her parents' names, name of children (including spouses if married), former places of residence, occupation details, military service, church and social organization affiliations, and more.  There are often ancestry details included that cannot be found in any other type of genealogical record.

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CHARLES D. MURRAY, a Cleveland democrat and one of the prominent lawyers of Dunkirk, was born at Guilford, Chenango county, New York, May 4, 1831, and is a son of Dauphin and Sallie (Seymour) Murray. His paternal grandfather, Captain Elihu Murray, commanded a company of Continental troops during the revolutionary war and afterwards removed from his native State of Connecticut to Guilford, where he died in 1837, at the advanced age of eighty-eight years. His son, Dauphin Murray (father), was born in Connecticut and spent the early part of his life as a farmer of Guilford. He then engaged in contracting on public works which he followed until 1855, when he was killed in a railroad accident at Hinsdale, Cattaraugus county. He was fifty-seven years of age at the time of his death, and his wife had preceded him to the tomb in 1852, when she passed away at Hinsdale, aged fifty-four years.

Charles D. Murray was brought by his parents, in 1839, from Guilford to Hinsdale, where he remained until 1845 and attended the “Old Red School-house.” At fourteen years of age he became a clerk in a dry goods house of Norwich, New York, in which he remained until 1850, when he joined in the westward tide of emigration to the Golden State of the Pacific slope. Arriving in San Francisco and finding no business opening he hired as a drayman, but soon saved enough money to buy himself a dray. He followed draying for one year, during which time he was on the alert for a business opening and found it in the jobbing produce and commission trade. He became a member of the firm of Murray & Foster, and handled large amounts of produce until 1855, when Mr. Murray was called home by the death of his father. During his business career in California he made three trips to Oregon and two trips with cargoes of lumber to Sidney, Australia. On his return home he engaged in the mercantile and lumbering business at Hinsdale, which he followed until 1858, when he went down with thousands of other business men in the panic of that year. In the last-named year he was appointed route agent in the mail service from Hornellsville to Dunkirk, on the Erie railroad, and had six hours of spare time every day at Hornellsville which he spent in reading law in the office of Reynolds & Brundage. In 1860 by a change in the administration he was removed from his position in the mail service and was admitted as an attorney and counselor of the Supreme Court of New York at its general session in Buffalo and opened an office at Hinsdale where he practiced until 1864. He was then drafted and in order to procure a substitute came to Dunkirk, with which he was so favorably impressed that he secured his present law-office in the Gerrans block. He enjoys an extensive and remunerative practice and has attained a prominent standing in his profession. Mr. Murray has been identified for several years with the financial, educational and religious interests of the city. He is vice-president of the Merchants National Bank which was organized March 6, 1882; was president of the board of education for six years and is a senior warden of St. John’s Protestant Episcopal church.

On the 20th of May, 1860, Mr. Murray united in marriage with Orpha A. Banfield, daughter of George D. Banfield, of Hinsdale, New York, They have three children — Henry T., who is in the law-office with his father; Lewis N., a clerk in the Merchants National Bank, and Maud M., wife of Henry M. Gerrans, one of the proprietors of the Iroquois hotel of Buffalo, N. Y.

Charles D. Murray is a democrat of the Jacksonian and Cleveland type and attended the Baltimore convention of 1858, and has been a delegate to several State conventions, and the Democratic National convention of 1884, which nominated Grover Cleveland for president. He served as president of the board of water commissioners, and was mayor of Dunkirk for one term. In 1870 Mr. Murray was the democratic nominee for Congress in his district (the 33d) which was then republican by six thousand majority, and lacked but three hundred votes of being elected.

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This family biography is one of 658 biographies included in Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Chautauqua County, New York published in 1891. 

View additional Chautauqua County, New York family biographies here: Chautauqua County, New York Biographies

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