When Raynale was three, his mother moved him and his sister Harriet to Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, where she remarried a year later, to Jonathan Sabin.
[1] In May 1828, he sailed on the steamboat Henry Clay from Buffalo to Detroit, then settled in Franklin, Michigan, and began practicing medicine.
[3] In 1835, he was chosen as a delegate to the state constitutional convention, and in October he was elected as a Democrat to a seat in the first session of the Michigan Senate, and was re-elected in 1837.
[1] Raynale was one of a group of 21 citizens who in 1846 purchased the property of Greenwood Cemetery in Birmingham and expanded it two four times its previous size.
[1] They had one child who died in infancy and four who lived to adulthood: Harriet E., Spencer B., Mary E., and Dr. Charles M. Raynale, who later took over his father's medical practice.