Caroline Wells Healey Dall was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 22 June 1822, the daughter of Mark and Caroline (Foster) Healey. Mark Healey, a Unitarian, was a wealthy merchant and banker who suffered serious financial reversals. At thirteen, Caroline Healey was publishing religious essays, and at fifteen was operating a day care center and doing mission work among the poor in Boston's North End. She was influenced in these activities by the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman. In 1841, she met Margaret Fuller, who became a lifelong influence. Between 1842 and 1844, Caroline Healey taught school in the Georgetown district of Washington, DC and became active in the anti-slavery movement. When she married the Rev. Charles Henry Appleton Dall in 1844, she participated in his pastoral work. At the same time, she became co-editor of Una, a women's journal published by Paulina Wright Davis in Providence, Rhode Island. After her husband's departure for India in 1855, Caroline Dall was left alone to care for their two children, Sarah and William. She embraced the cause of women's rights and of other social issues of her day. In 1859, she organized the New England Woman's Rights Convention in Boston. In her work of lecturing and publishing, Caroline Dall emphasized suffrage and the economic role of women in society. In 1860, the Boston newspaper The Liberator published a letter she wrote to discourage the election of John Frémont to the presidency. Abraham Lincoln acknowledged her support of him. She was a founder of the American Social Science Association (1865) and later became its director. At the age of fifty-five, she received an LL.D. degree from Alfred University. Among her publications are "Woman's Right to Labor," or, Low Wages and Hard Work: in Three Lectures, Delivered in Boston, November, 1859 (1860), Woman's Rights Under the Law (1861), and The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867). Her other writings deal with feminism, literature, biography, and travel. She died in Washington, DC on 17 December 1912 and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rev. Charles Henry Appleton Dall, born in 1816, was a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, and did ministerial work in Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Toronto before going to Calcutta in 1855 as the first Unitarian foreign missionary. He remained in India for thirty-one years. Several sources suggest that his emotions were uneven. The Dictionary of American Biography alludes to "charges" he served but gives no further explanation. Rev. Dall married Caroline Wells Healey in 1844; they had two children, Sarah and William, who were probably named after his Uncle William and Aunt Sarah Dall. Among his publications are Patriotism in Bengal (1858), Letters to the "Englishman" on the North-West Provinces Exhibition at Agra (1867), and From Calcutta to London, by the Suez Canal (1869). He died in 1886.

William Healey Dall, the son of Charles and Caroline Dall, was born on 21 August 1845. He studied zoology under Louis Agassiz at Harvard and then continued his studies at the Chicago Academy of Sciences. In 1865, he assisted Robert Kennicott in the Western Union International Telegraph Expedition to explore possibilities for communication with Europe through Alaska and the Bering Strait. After Kennicott's death, Dall commanded the expedition. After this work on the Atlantic cable, he lived in Alaska to pursue his special interest in mollusks. Dall was part of the U.S. Coast Survey between 1871 and 1884. In 1880, he was named honorary curator of mollusks in the United States National Museum. In 1884, he was paleontologist with the Geological Survey. He continued to research mollusks at the Smithsonian Institution. Dall was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1897 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Among his many publications are Alaska and Its Resources (1897) and Spencer Fullerton Baird: A Biography (1915). He wrote poetry as well as scientific treatises. Dall was married to Annette Whitney; they had three children, one of whom, Marion, is a correspondent in this collection. William Dall died on 27 March 1927.

Sarah Keene Healey Dall Munro, the daughter of Charles and Caroline Dall, was born in 1849. She married Josiah G. Munro, and they had two children, Willis and Charles. Willis attended Harvard College. References to Charles suggest that he may have died in childhood of epilepsy. Sarah Munro sought help for her epileptic son and lectured on the illness.