Margaret "Ma" Murray
Canadian journalist and newspaper editor
Ma Murray, OC (née Margaret Theresa Lally; 1888 – September 25, 1982, age 94) was an American-Canadian newspaper editor, publisher, and columnist, an officer of the Order of Canada, and the wife of publisher and British Columbia MLA George Murray. The Murrays' publications were The Chinook (Vancouver, British Columbia) the Bridge River-Lillooet News (Lillooet, British Columbia) and the Alaska Highway News (Fort St. John, British Columbia).
She was co-founder and editor (with her husband George) of the Bridge River-Lillooet News, the Alaska Highway News and other publications. Her editorials were famously signed off with the catchphrase "And that's fer damshur!"
Early years
Born Margaret Theresa Lally in Kansas City, Missouri to Irish immigrants, Margaret was raised on rural Kansas farmland in the United States, largely in poverty. She was the seventh of nine children. She left school at 13. At 17, she spent a year in Fremont, Nebraska, studying to be a typist, bookkeeper, filing clerk, shorthand writer, and business administrator. She worked for a period in the shipping department at the Shipley Saddlery Company in Kansas City.
She came to Vancouver, British Columbia en route to Calgary, Alberta, where she hoped to find herself a cowboy to wed (she and her sister, Bess, had corresponded with cowboys who had written in response to the notes they had tucked into the most expensive saddles being shipped north).
“Margaret "Ma" Murray” enters the record as canadian journalist and newspaper editor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Margaret, Murray and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6759611. The first chronological checks are 1888 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Margaret "Ma" Murray” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.