Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, on July 29, 1742, Isabella Marshall grew up in Elderslie, near Paisley, in a religious family and received a good education. In 1765 she married Dr. John Graham, an army surgeon whom she accompanied to Canada in 1767. They lived successively in Quebec, Montreal, and Fort Niagara and on the island of Antigua, where Dr. Graham died in 1773. She then returned with her children to Scotland and opened a small school in Paisley. Later she opened a boarding school for girls in Edinburgh, where she also was active in various charitable enterprises, notably a ╥penny Society,╙ a fund for mutual relief in case of sickness to which the poor subscribers contributed a penny weekly. The society later became the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick. In 1789 she returned to America and settled in New York City, where she opened a girls╒ school that was immediately successful. She also continued her charitable work and in November 1797 led a group of women, including Elizabeth Bayley Seton (later Saint Elizabeth), in organizing the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, of which she became ╥First Directress.╙ She gave up teaching the next year to devote full time to philanthropy.
The society was one of the earliest organizations of its kind in America, and under Graham╒s leadership it distributed assistance to hundreds of needy widows. The society also sought work for them and established a house for needlework. From 1802, when a state charter was granted, the society received money from the legislature to supplement that raised by public appeal. She presided over a meeting in March 1806 at which the Orphan Asylum Society was founded, largely as a result of the labors of her daughter, Joanna Graham Bethune. She taught in the asylum╒s Lancasterian school and from 1810 was a trustee of the managing society. She was chosen president of the board of ladies in charge of the Magdalen House of the Magdalen Society on its organization in 1811. In 1814, shortly before her death, she led in founding the Society for the Promotion of Industry Among the Poor. She died in New York City on July 27, 1814.
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