She and her family moved to Enoch near Girvan in Ayrshire where they farmed and Elizabeth attended a small private school.

[2] She married Robert Gray on 8 April 1856 and they both shared an interest in collecting fossils each holiday back in Girvan.

Elizabeth's specimens were frequently used at the start of meetings of the Natural History Society of Glasgow but with poor attribution that implied that her husband or she were possibly those responsible.

[1] The curator of the Hunterian Museum was John Young who was the Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Glasgow[4] and a strong supporter for women's higher education.

[1] The palaeontologist Thomas Davidson, a specialist in brachiopods, was probably the first to utilise the Gray collection and described several new species in his monograph on the British Fossil Brachiopoda (1866-71).

In 1878–1880, R. Etheridge and H. Alleyne Nicholson published a Monograph of the Silurian Fossils of the Girvan District in Ayrshire using Gray's collection.

Gray was constantly organising and begging for assistance to ensure that her finds were described correctly and to this end she had a long and at times impatient correspondence with Francis Bather at the British Museum.

[8][9] The ODNB notes that Gray was "a woman of considerable character, determination, and resourcefulness, with a phenomenally retentive memory.

They would cover where they had been working to avoid others discovering their current interest and they would not retire for the night until the days findings had been catalogued.