Bliss, John Murray

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Phillip Buckner, “BLISS, JOHN MURRAY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bliss_john_murray_6E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, militia officer, office holder, politician, colonial administrator, and judge; b. 22 Feb. 1771 in Massachusetts, son of Daniel Bliss and Isabella (Isabel) Murray; m. 7 Aug. 1797 Sarah Green Upham in Saint John, N.B., and they had two sons and four daughters; d. there 22 Aug. 1834.
    • The father of John Murray Bliss was a prominent Massachusetts lawyer and loyalist who immigrated to New Brunswick with his family after being appointed to the first provincial council in 1784. In 1797 Bliss married his first cousin Sarah Green Upham, the daughter of judge Joshua Upham, another member of the New Brunswick Council, and in 1819 their son George Pidgeon Bliss married the daughter of Thomas Wetmore, the attorney general of New Brunswick. By the 1820s the Blisses, Murrays, Uphams, and Wetmores thus composed an interrelated network of loyalist families, and the acknowledged patriarch of “this powerful family,” as Lieutenant Governor Sir Howard Douglas described it, was John Murray Bliss.
    • In its obituary the New-Brunswick Courier proclaimed that Bliss had been “revered and beloved” by the legal profession and that “the dignity of his demeanor and the distinguished urbanity of his manners” had “won . . . the regard of all who were brought into contact with him.” and ” He took an active part in community affairs in Fredericton, where he served at various times as a trustee of the College of New Brunswick, chairman of the local branch of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and president of the New-Brunswick Agricultural and Emigrant Society. Yet he owed his political influence not to his public service but to his extensive connections among leading loyalist families.
  • Son of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=645
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/60845475/john-murray-bliss