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Jane Shen was active as a poet during the period from approximately 1969 to 1971 when she was a student at the University of Toronto. Her poems were published in Alphabet, Catalyst and Descant, among others, and were also read on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Anthology series.

Dick Sheppard was born in Windsor on 2 September 1880 and educated at Marlborough and Trinity Hall Cambridge. In July 1914 be became Vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields church. He came to be well known for his religious broadcasts. In 1929 he became Dean of Canterbury. He was one of the founders of the Peace Pledge Union in 1936. He died suddenly in London on 31 October 1937.

Sammy Shields, comedian, was born in Glasgow on 20 June 1874. He made his first appearance on the variety stage at the Holborn Empire in June 1905 and went on to a successful career in music hall theatres. He died in London in 1933.

Elizabeth Gwillim, gentlewoman, author and artist, was baptized on 22 September 1762 in Aldwincle, England according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. She married John Graves Simcoe on 30 December 1782, at the age of twenty, if the date of birth given by the DCB is correct. From 1791 to 1796 she lived with her husband in Upper Canada as he served out his term as Lieutenant Governor. While there she kept diaries and painted water colours of Canadian scenes. Her writings were published as The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe in 1911. She died at Wolford Lodge near Honiton, England on 17 January 1850.

During the First World War Marion S. Simpson of Hamilton, Ont. wrote letters of encouragement and sent parcels, mainly socks, to Canadian soldiers overseas.

Norman Frederick Simpson, playwright, was born in London on 29 January 1919. He was educated at the University of London and for many years made his living as a teacher. He established his reputation as a playwright in the Ionesco line with two productions in the late 1950s: A Resounding Tinkle, produced in 1957 and published in 1958 and One Way Pendulum, produced in 1959 and published in 1960. These plays present the absurd in a deadpan manner. Simpson has also written for radio and television and published one novel Harry Bleachbaker (1976). From 1976 to 1978 he was literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre. He died on August 27, 2011.

The Simpson and Reid families were both based in Aberdeen, Scotland during the early nineteenth century.

Thomas Bassett Reid, the patriarch of the Reid family, originally hailed from London. He was active as a bootmaker in that city from at least 1786. In 1820 he dissolved a business partnership with one Edward Eld, leaving the latter in control of all its assets, and sometime afterward he moved to Scotland.

There he met Lilly McLachlan of Aberdeen, whom he subsequently married in 1828. The banns were published in Glasgow and the two were wed at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh, where the couple settled. They had at least five children: Thomas, Alexander, George (b. 1832), Anne (b. 1835), and Amelia. Some time after Anne's birth, the family relocated to Aberdeen, which was to be their home for a generation.

Thomas the elder, the family patriarch, died sometime prior to 1851; his daughter Amelia died in 1857.

Thomas the younger served in the British Army; being appointed assistant surgeon in 1851 and full surgeon in 1858. During this time period — which coincided with the Rebellion of 1857 — he served for several years in India. His correspondence home provides a valuable insight into his life and impressions during this period. After returning home, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Aberdeen and subsequently became a licensed physician. He later set up a private practise in Aberdeen.

His younger brother George, an engineer, died at Suez (presumably during the construction of the canal) in 1865, leaving all his worldly goods to his mother Lilly.

Anne, a teacher by profession, married James Walker Simpson in 1861. By the time of their wedding, neither of James’ parents (James and Margaret) were still living.

Little is known of Alexander’s education and life save that he followed in his elder brother’s footsteps and became, like Thomas, a physician.

Over the course of the late nineteenth century, at least one branch of the family relocated to Canada. Alexander, his sister Anne, and her husband James Simpson all made the journey during this period. Alexander settled in Hamilton, and James is known to have relocated to Montreal some time prior to 1911.

In spite of time and distance, the Simpson, MacLachlan, and Reid families remained in contact for many years. Descendents of the family live in and around Hamilton to this day.

Hans Sinn made a career of active involvement in all phases of national and international peace work. As a member of the editorial group Sanity: Peace Oriented News and Comment, Sinn observed Canadian and world affairs from a non-aligned peace perspective. Sanity, based in Montreal, was North America's leading independent peace newspaper.

Hans Sinn's wife Marion, a teacher who specialized in early childhood development and who worked with children with learning disabilities, was book reviewer for Sanity. In the summers of 1965, 1967 and 1968 Sinn was a staff member and participant at the Training Institute for Nonviolence, at Grindstone Island, Portland, Ont. This institute was sponsored by the Canadian Friends Service Committee, the peace and development wing of Canadian Quakers. The focus of the Grindstone Island Training Institute for Nonviolence was to explore non-violent ways in which a civilian population can defend itself from tyranny, from without or within, to maintain the cherished values and ways of the community. In 1976, when Diana Kingsmill Wright decided to sell the island, the Grindstone Co-operative was formed to take over the ownership and operations of the property. This led to Grindstone's transformation into a non-profit, cooperatively owned and operated peace education centre. Hans and Marion Sinn were members of the co-operative and on the co-operative's Board of Directors. Both were actively involved on the programming committee. On February 5, 1983, Hans and Marion Sinn resigned from the administration of Grindstone, citing other interests and a lack of time to devote to the co-operative's administration. The Grindstone Co-operative ceased operations in 1990. Hans Sinn became involved with Peace Brigades International, an organization founded in the summer of 1981 on Grindstone Island by Hans Sinn, Murray Thomson and ten others. Peace Brigades International is a unique grassroots organization which, when invited, sends volunteer peace teams to areas of conflict or political repression.

Slater was a barber and made parasols. He emigrated from England to Canada in 1890, settling in Hamilton, where he lived until his death, 10 November 1931.

Richard Slobodin (1915-2005) was an American anthropologist and a founder of the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Born and educated in New York City, he worked extensively from the 1930s onwards as an ethnologist. The chief focus of his ethnological studies were the Dené peoples of the Yukon and Alaska, particularly the Gwich'in (Kutchin). His scholarly interests were broad, however, and he published extensively on a variety of subjects. These publications included significant biographical treatments of pioneering anthropologists <a href="http://holdings.mcmaster.ca/index.php/rivers-w-h-r-2">W.H.R. Rivers</a> and Northcote W. Thomas.

After a brief stint in the United States armed forces during and after the Second World War, he returned to academic life only to fall afoul of Sen. Robert McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUUAC) in the early 1950s. This blacklisting saw him disbarred from academic employment for a period of seven years, during which time he worked a variety of jobs to support himself before eventually completing his Ph.D. in 1959. He spent the next four years working various academic appointments in the United States while seeking entry to Canada, which repeatedly denied him a visa owing to his supposed Marxist connections.

He finally was admitted to Canada in 1964, accepting an academic appointment at McMaster University, and he became a Canadian citizen in 1970. During the 1960s and 1970s Slobodin continued extensive fieldwork in the Arctic while also playing an instrumental role in developing the faculty of anthropology at McMaster, of which he was a co-founder. In 1981, he was forced to accept compulsory retirement owing to his age, but remained active in the United Church and the New Democratic Party while maintaining voluminous correspondence with friends and fellow scholars around the world. He died in 2005 at the age of 89.

Charlotte Turner, poet and novelist, was born in London on 4 May 1749. On 23 February 1765 she married Benjamin Smith. She turned to publishing her poetry after she and her husband were imprisoned for his debts. In 1788 he published her first novel, Emmeline, in four volumes. She was a mother of twelve; eight of her children were still alive when Charlotte Smith died on 28 October 1806 in Tilford, near Farnham, Surrey.

Rutherford Smith was born on 3 November 1877 in Mount Hope, Ontario, the second son of Joel and Margaret (née Dancey) Smith. He graduated from Caledonia High School and joined his dad in their carriage building business. After his father’s death, Robert Murphy, an archaeologist, helped Smith with his collection in the 1930s. Smith became interested in archaeology after his marriage to Ethel Louise Fothergill in 1929. He enjoyed finding artifacts, researching them and then giving them away. William Cleland and his nephew J.B. Morton convinced Smith to collect artifacts for their value. His wife often helped him catalogue artifacts. He was an active collector from 1933 until 1959. He excavated 64 sites almost entirely within Wentworth County. The largest and most important site from which he collected was the Dwyer Ossuary (AiHa-3) in Beverly Township. After the completion of the dig, he stopped actively collecting. Smith’s main source of artifacts (other than digging himself) was from close friends, William Cleland and Frank Butters, and from farmers as gifts. The Smith artifact collection contains over 10,000 artifacts. The Smith artifact collection, now housed the Ethnography collection in the Department of Anthropology, was willed to McMaster University, shortly after Smith’s death on 10 October 1952 in Guelph, Ontario.

Stewart Smith was born in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. His father, A.E. Smith, was a social gospel church minister in Brandon and leader of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. In 1923, Stewart moved to Toronto and began organizing. The following year he accepted an offer from the CPC to become the National Secretary of the Young Communist League. In 1926, he attended the Lenin School in Moscow and was later appointed to the Political Bureau of the CPC. In 1937, he was elected alderman on the Toronto City Council as the first communist elected to office in Toronto’s history. In 1946, he was elected to the Board of Control. Stewart was a prominent member of the Labor-Progressive Party of Ontario and served as party leader between 1951 and 1957. He resigned from the Communist Party of Canada in 1957.

Dame Ethel Smyth, composer, author, and feminist, was born on 23 April 1858 in Sidcup, England. She was educated at the Leipzig Conservatorium. As well as several operas and other musical pieces, she composed suffragette music, including The March of the Women.

She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University. She wrote several autobiographical works, beginning with <I>Impressions That Remained (1919) and ending with What Happened Next* (1940). She died in Woking, Surrey on 9 May 1944.

Born in county Antrim, Ireland on 27 December 1861, Albert E. S. Smythe was a journalist in Belfast, Chicago, and Toronto (Toronto Globe, World, The Lamp). He was President of Toronto Press Club in 1907. He also wrote two books of poetry: Poems Grave and Gay (1891) and The Garden of the Sun (1923). He introduced theosophy into Canada, and was the first president of the Toronto Theosophical Society. He died in Hamilton, Ont., on 2 October 1947.

Harry W. Snelling was born in Woolich, England on October 14, 1849. In March 1867 Snelling enlisted in the 60th Royal Rifles, 1st Battalion. Snelling and his battalion were sent to Canada to assist with the Riel uprising in 1870. Following his armed service, Snelling became involved in the operation of a small Montreal store. He married a woman from Ireland, named Jane (4 May 1840-, and they had a daughter Isabella Caroline (25 Sept. 1879-). Between 1891 and 1901 the family moved from Montreal to Kingston where he was the Manager for a telephone company. He was still alive in 1921 when the census was conducted.

The Social Democratic Party of Canada (SDPC) was a Marxist organization that formed in 1911 as a result of a split from the Socialist Party of Canada over affiliation with the Socialist International. The SDPC was affiliated with the International Socialist Bureau, and had a paper entitled Cotton’s Weekly (1908-1915), continued by the Canadian Forward (1916-1918). Prominent Ontario members of the SDPC included James Simpson, a mayor of Toronto in the 1930s. Most of the SDPC members joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1921 or the CCF in the 1930s.

The Socialist Labor Party of Canada was founded on a national basis in the early 1930s with its head office in Toronto. It rejects capitalism in its entirety. It is affiliated with the Socialist Labor Party of America. The party seems to have dissolved after the death of its National Secretary, Doug Irving, in 2005.

The Socialist Party of Canada was founded in 1904 when the Socialist Party of British Columbia merged with the Canadian Socialist League. By 1910 the party stretched across Canada. The party's philosophy is revolutionary, holding a view known as "impossibilism", that is that capitalism is not capable of being reformed. Support for the party waned after the collapse of the 1919 general strikes. The Socialist Party of Canada is affiliated with the World Socialist Party of the United States and the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

The first Society of Friends Preparative Meeting in Upper Canada was held at Yonge Street, 6 June 1804, authorized by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The first Yonge Street Monthly Meeting was held in September 1806. In 1812, Yonge Street Monthly Meeting allowed an indulged meeting to be held at the house of John Haight which was situated near Pickering. In 1819 a Preparative Meeting was established at Pickering in the newly built meeting house which was used until 1833-34 when a new meeting house was built.

There was a split in 1828 between Orthodox members and a Hicksite faction with the Hicksites forced to establish a new meeting house about two miles away. This split was not unique to Pickering but reflective of a wider movement both in British North America and the United States which is often referred to as the Great Separation. Friends who were followers of Elias Hicks separated from the existing body of Friends.