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Lieutenant-Colonel (Retired) Francis Edward Wootton, OBE, MC, ED, was born on 19 January 1885 in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Wootton served for more than four years during the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919. He enlisted again during the Second World War and served from 1939 to 1945. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the last year of the war. He was also awarded the Canadian Efficiency Decoration for his long and meritorious service in the militia. In July 1937 Francis became assistant superintendent for the CPR in Kenora, Ontario and he and his family lived there for more than two years. Francis enlisted again when the Second World War started. He was commissioned as a Lieutenant-Colonel and given command of the 4th Army Field Brigade, Royal Canadian Artillery on 1 December 1939. He led his unit to England in February 1940 but returned to Canada in April. He served at Camp Petawawa until 1943, most of that time as the senior administrative officer. In March 1943 Francis helped organize the No. 1 Canadian Railway Operating Group, Royal Canadian Engineers, and he commanded the unit in France and Germany in the last two years of the war.

In November 1945 Francis was promoted to superintendent for the CPR in Medicine Hat, Alberta. In November 1949 he moved to Ottawa to serve as a railway advisor to the Defence Research Board. He retired from the CPR in January 1950 after 47 years of service, including ten years with the Canadian army.

Wootton was married in Winnipeg on 26 July 1919 to Ada Isabella Sharman. He and his wife had one son, Francis William Wootton, who was born in Saskatoon in 1922. Francis William graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada and went on to have a career in the military, retiring as a Brigadier-General. Wootton passed away in the Ottawa Civic Hospital on 27 September 1951, at age 66.

Mary Louise Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975.

Her first book, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, made an important contribution to critical theory by demonstrating that the foundation of written literary narrative can be seen in the structure of Oral Narrative. In it Pratt uses the research of William Labov to show that all narratives contain common structures that can be found in both literary and oral narratives.

In her more recent research, Pratt has studied what she calls contact zones - areas in which two or more cultures communicate and negotiate shared histories and power relations. She remarks that contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” In her article “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Pratt also coins the term autoethnographic texts, which are “text[s] in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.”

J. Robertson Trith was an artist.

A. H. Hider was an artist.

No information is known about this individual.

William Thomson Freeland was born in 1870. While very few details of his career have survived, he is known to have had some interest in photographing boats using a large format or panoramic camera as early as the 1890s. He operated a photographic studio for a period of time on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto but it is unknown how long it was in operation or the type of work that was carried out. It is known that Freeland did some work for the Department of Agriculture.

Perhaps his best known photograph is a panoramic photograph of Toronto that is currently housed in the City of Toronto Archives, Library and Archives Canada and the Toronto Reference Library collection. Created in 1903, "this image, comprising the whole horizon, begins and ends at Union Station . . . ". There are other Freeland panoramas in existence from the same period but none approach the size of the Niagara Falls photographs recently uncovered. Freeland died in 1945 at the age of 75.

Arthur James Marshall Smith FRSC (November 8, 1902 – November 21, 1980) was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He "was a prominent member of a group of Montreal poets" – the Montreal Group, which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A. M. Klein, and F. R. Scott — "who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still rigidly rooted in Victorianism." Smith was born in Montreal, but lived in England from 1918 to 1920, where he "studied for the Cambridge Local Examinations, 'and failed everything except English and history' (he later wrote)." In England he became aware of contemporary poetry: "he frequented Harold Monroe's bookshop, then the citadel of Georgian poetry, and read much in the recent war poets and the Imagists."

James Curtis "Pat" Houston, a mining engineer, was born 19 July 1906 in Toronto, Ontario. Raised in Jordan Station, Ontario, he attended Queen's University and graduated in 1930 with a BSc in Mining and Metallurgical Engineering. Houston worked in Manitoba as a bush miner, and later in Sudbury, Ontario. He passed away in 1996.

Robert McLaughlin had his roots in Tyrone County, Ireland. By the mid 1800's he had been "lured" to the Peterborough area of Ontario with the promise of free farm land. In 1867 or so, McLaughlin built himself a horse carriage. So good was his design and craftsmanship that the neighbours asked him to build carriages for them. As knowledge of the quality of McLaughlin's carriage spread, demand increased. In 1869 he founded the McLaughlin Carriage Company in response to the demand for his carriages. In 1876, seeking better access to markets, he moved his business to Oshawa. The company was owned by McLaughlin and two of his three sons, Sam and George, both of whom started at the bottom of their father's carriage business as sweepers. In 1899 the business was temporarily relocated in Gananoque when the business was destroyed by fire. With the advent of the automobile George and his brother, along with George Hezzelwood, formed the McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited in 1907. For a time the family continued to produce carriages. Then, in 1915, Robert McLaughlin sold the carriage works to Jim Thudhope of Orillia, Ontario. In writing at the time of his difficulty in letting the works go, he simply observed: "[The] gasoline engine [is] at present working a revolution in the horse-drawn vehicle trade."

Carl Heilig was a student at Queen's University.