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David Helwig was born in Toronto in April 1938 and was raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He received his BA from the University of Toronto in 1960 and earned his Masters at the University of Liverpool in 1962.

During the mid-1960s, Helwig became established in the Canadian literary scene by co-founding Quarry Magazine with Tom Marshall and Michael Ondaatje. Based in Kingston, Ontario, he became an English professor at Queens University and taught courses at Collins Bay Penitentiary. Using prose interviews with an inmate of the penitentiary, Helwig published a book about his experiences titled A Book About Billie (Oberon Press, 1972).

Between 1974 and 1976, Helwig worked as the literary manager of CBC’s television drama department, and continued to work freelance at CBC in the following decades.

Helwig is the author of 17 books of poetry, 25 books of fiction, and several other books which include translations, collected essays, and his memoir. Among his novels are a collection set in Kingston, Ontario, known as “The Kingston Novels”: The Glass Knight (1976), Jennifer (1979), It’s Always Summer (1982), and A Sound Like Laughter (1983). His autobiography, The Names of Things: A Memoir was published in 2006. His poetry collections have received numerous awards, including the CBC poetry award for Catchpenny Poems (1983), and the Atlantic Poetry Award for The Year One (2004).

In 1996, Helwig relocated to Prince Edward Island. He was appointed the province’s Poet Laureate in 2008 and received the Order of Canada in 2009. He is also a recipient of the Matt Cohen Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada for lifetime contribution to Canadian literature.
As an essayist, Helwig published regularly in the Globe and Mail’s Facts & Arguments section (1990-1992) and the monthly PEI magazine, The Buzz (2005-2015).

His partner, Judy Gaudet, is an accomplished poet. His daughter, Maggie Helwig, is an Anglican priest, author, and social advocate in Toronto.

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, journalist, politician, and poet, was born on 13 April 1825 in Carlingford, County Louth, Ireland. He left for New England for the first time in 1842. It was not until 1857, after a return to Ireland and a further sojourn in the United States, that he moved to Montreal. In December 1857 he was elected to represent Montreal in the Legislative Assembly. By 1867 the Irish Republican Brotherhood, more popularly known as the Fenians, were on the rise. McGee opposed them because of their support of republicans and their plans to invade British North America. McGee lost his support in the Irish community and was on the verge of withdrawing from politics when he was assassinated in Ottawa on 7 April 1868. An Irish immigrant, Patrick James Whelan, was convicted of the crime and executed on 11 February 1869. In addition to his journalism and speeches, McGee wrote A Popular History of Ireland (1863), which is considered to be his best work, and poetry which was collected and published after his death.

Seth (born Gregory Gallant) is a renowned Canadian cartoonist, visual artist, and book designer. Seth has achieved prominence in the realm of independent comics for works which often express nostalgia for early to mid-twentieth century Canada.

Seth was born in Clinton, Ontario in 1962. He grew up in Southern Ontario, a region which is frequently featured in his work. Seth attended Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto from 1980-1983. During this time, he took on his pseudonym.

In April 1991, Seth launched his comic series Palookaville with Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly. His next project, the autobiographical graphic novel It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, was published to wide acclaim in 1996 (Drawn & Quarterly). Seth would go on to win two Ignatz awards for the volume, which was listed by The Comics Journal as one of the 100 best comics of the twentieth century.

Seth has since published eight more graphic novels and has contributed illustrations to a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Best American Comics, McSweeneys Quarterly, The Walrus, and Canadian Notes & Queries. His illustrations are also in Lemony Snicket’s children’s series and Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe collections (audio recordings and books).

Additionally, Seth has undertaken significant book design projects: in 2014, Fantagraphics Books enlisted him to design the complete collection of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts. Seth has since designed additional comics reprint series featuring the works of John Stanley and Doug Wright.

Seth has received each of the major American comic awards, including the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz.

Since the early 2000s, he has lived in Guelph, Ontario.

Edward E. Seymour, prominent labour organizer, was born 30 July 1940 in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. He was raised in Sydney, Nova Scotia and attended Sydney Academy prior to moving to Ontario in 1958. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Waterloo in 1974. He is the author of An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour 1800-1974 (1976, 2nd ed. 1980) and Illuminating the Past Brightening the Future: An Illustrated History International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 353 1903-2003 (2003).

Mr. Seymour’s trade union experience dates back to 1962 when he became a member of Lodge 1246, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. From 1970 to 1977, he was the Canadian Education and Publicity Director for the Textile Workers Union of America. In 1977 he was the national representative for the Communications Workers of Canada (CLC). In 1986 he established Solidarity Consulting, a consulting firm for unions. He was also a partner of Resolutions Unlimited (established in 2000), a firm that focuses on the resolution of harassment and discrimination in the work place. Mr. Seymour served many times on arbitration boards for a number of unions.

Ruth Ann Borchiver was a social worker and psychologist. Her father, David Biderman, joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1921. She grew up speaking Yiddish and attended leftist shules. As a teenager, she briefly taught Yiddish at the Morris Winchevsky Shule in Toronto before pursuing a career in social work. She was head of Jewish Child and Family Services until the late 1950s. In 1991, she completed a Doctor of Education in applied psychology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, based on interviews with former members of the Communist movement in Canada, was titled: “A Social-Psychological Analysis of Millennial Thought in the Communist Party of Canada: 1921-1957.

Paul Kirzner was born into a secular Jewish family in Toronto. His father was active in the Bundist movement, and one of the founders of the Toronto Cloakmakers’ Union in Canada. He joined the Young Communist League in 1932. He later formed a small company which distributed Soviet films. In 1940, he joined a closed group of the Communist Party of Canada and the Labour League. In 1949, he was a delegate of the UJPO to the Canadian Peace Congress. He was an original member of the New Fraternal Jewish Association, founded in 1960, though he later became less active due to a disagreement about Israel. He was an active member of the NDP and served on the provincial council and was treasurer of the Toronto area council.

Paul Kirzner was the husband of Sarah Kirzner.

Rachel Manley is an author of poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, and member of a prominent Jamaican political family about whom she has written several lauded memoirs. She is the daughter of Michael Manley, a Jamaican politician who served three terms as prime minister (1972-80, 1989-92). Her paternal grandparents are Edna Manley, a sculptor and arts educator, and Norman Manley, co-founder of the Jamaican People’s National Party and the first Premier of Jamaica.
Rachel Manley was born in Cornwall, England in 1947 to Michael Manley and his second wife, Jacqueline Kammelard. At the age of two, she was sent to Jamaica, where she was raised by her paternal grandparents in their home, Drumblair. In 1969, Manley receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (Special Honours) from the University of the West Indies.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Manley published three volumes of poetry and contributed to several magazines and literary journals, including The Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, and Focus. She also worked in a variety of roles, including as a high school teacher and member of the radio advertising department of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1980-1986). In 1979, she received the Jamaica Centennial Medal for poetry.
In 1986, Manley immigrated to Canada, where she would eventually settle in Toronto. In 1989, Manley edited a version of her grandmother’s diaries, published by Andre Deutsch under the title Edna Manley: The Diaries.
Manley began writing family memoirs in the 1990s, publishing Drumblair, a book about her childhood with her grandparents, in 1996. The book was critically acclaimed, winning the 1997 Governor General’s Award for English language non-fiction. This volume was the first in a memoir trilogy; it was followed by Slipstream, about Michael Manley (2000), and Horses in Her Hair, about Edna Manley (2008).
These works were followed by two additional novels, The Black Peacock (2017) and The Fellowship (2019). The Black Peacock was shortlisted for the 2018 Amazon First Novel award.
Manley has received many writing fellowships over the years, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow (Literature) from Radcliffe College, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Fellowship; and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Poetry: Prisms (1972) Poems 2 (Coles Printery, 1978) A Light Left On (Peepal Tree, 1992)
Non-fiction: Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1996) Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000) In My Father’s Shade (UK version of Slipstream) (BlackAmber Books, 2004) Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter’s Story (Key Porter Books, 2008)
Fiction: The Black Peacock (Cormorant Books, 2017) The Fellowship (Cormorant Books, 2019)

Joseph (Yosef) Baruch Salsberg was born in Lagow, in the Opatow district of Radom Gubernica, (now Poland, then under Russian rule) in 1902. He was the son of Sarah-Gitel and Abraham, a baker who worked in Canada as a junk peddler after immigrating in 1910. In 1913, the Salsberg family immigrated to Toronto to join Abraham, and settled Toronto’s Jewish district on Cecil Street. J.B. quit school at age fourteen and acquired a trade in the textile industry; he later joined the United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Worker International Union and became a union organizer. He married Dora Wilensky (1901-1959), a social worker who would later head Toronto Jewish Family and Child Services. Salsberg organized in Toronto, Montreal, New York, and Chicago and became a key figure in the Worker’s Unity League, the Canadian Friends of the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of Canada. He was elected to Toronto City Council as an alderman of Ward 4 in 1938 and 1943. Between 1943 and 1955 he represented the St. Andrew riding in Toronto in the Ontario Parliament as a member of the Labor-Progressive party. Due to his criticism of the Soviet Union, he was expelled from the CPC in October 1956. In 1959, he founded the New Fraternal Jewish Association. Following the end of his political career, he continued to write and speak on Leftist and Jewish topics.

Gary Barwin is the author of twenty-six books of poetry and fiction, as well as works for children and teens. He is also a composer, multidisciplinary artist, and owner and operator of Serif of Nottingham Editions, a Hamilton-based small press. Through Serif of Nottingham and other small presses, Barwin has also published numerous chapbooks, broadsides, and pamphlets.

Barwin was born in 1964 in Northern Ireland. His family immigrated to Canada in the 1970s. In 1985, Barwin graduated from York University with a BFA in music and a BA in creative writing. He went on to complete a PhD in music composition at SUNY Buffalo.

Barwin has taught creative writing at several colleges and universities, including King’s University College (Western University), McMaster University, and Mohawk College. He has also participated in writer in residence programs at Toronto Public Library, Western University, London Public Library, McMaster University, Hamilton Public Library, Wilfrid Laurier University, and others. In addition, Barwin has taught creative writing to at-risk youth through Hamilton’s ArtForms program.

Barwin’s novel Yiddish for Pirates was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel also won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and the Hamilton Literary Award. Barwin is also a four-time recipient of the Hamilton Book of the Year award and a co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Manya Kantorowicz was born in Bialystok, Poland in December 1906. The youngest daughter of nine children; her mother was a baker, and her parents were secular Jews in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) tradition. She developed an early interest in Communist politics. At age 13, she left Bialystok, Poland and joined the Twelfth Children’s Work Commune in Vitesbsk, Russia; and entered the Teachers’ Seminary there in 1923. In 1926 she immigrated to Montreal where her brothers had earlier settled. She joined the Young Communist League in Montreal immediately following her arrival. She married Sam Lipshitz on 20 January 1930. They moved to Brunswick Street in Toronto, and she began a 25-year career teaching Yiddish and Jewish History at the Morris Winchevsky School, operated by the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO). In 1977, Manya published a memoir of her recollections of Jewish life in Russia and immigrating to Canada, titled Bletlekh fun a shturmisher tsayt. It was published in translation as Time Remembered: A Jewish Children’s Commune in the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Toronto: Lugus Publications, 1991).

Sarah Kirzner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto. Her parents were from Warsaw, Poland. Her sister immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and her brother immigrated to Saskatchewan at age 16, where he became involved in Leftist politics. She became involved in the Young Communist League at age 18, when her brother encouraged the group to recruit her. She became involved in the Office and Store Employees Union, fighting for a $12.50 per week minimum wage. At the YCL, she met her husband Paul, and became leader of the Toronto YCL group named for Norman Bethune. After being disillusioned by Communist politics, particularly following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, she left the Communist Party officially in 1956.

Sarah Kirzner was the wife of Paul Kirzner.

Harvey Feit is professor emeritus in McMaster University’s Department of Anthropology. A major focus of Feit’s research is his work with Eeyou (Cree) peoples in Eeyou Istchee (primarily Northern Québec), particularly around the creation and implementation of the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (JBNQA).

Feit was born in 1941. He pursued graduate studies in anthropology at McGill University, receiving an M.A. in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1979. Feit’s research on Eeyou hunters led him to work closely with Eeyou communities on various ethnographic projects and, eventually, the negotiation and implementation of the JBNQA, which was the first major land claim agreement and treaty between the Crown and Indigenous peoples in Canada since the early 20th century. From 1972-1987, Feit served as expert witness in the court case preceding the signing of the JBNQA (Chief Robert Kanatewat et al. vs. JBDC, JBEC et al. in Québec Superior Court, 1973) and worked as a researcher, program and policy developer, and advisor with Eeyou negotiators and government bodies. A project of particular significance that Feit contributed to during this time was an income security program to sustain Eeyou families living on the land.

Feit was assistant professor at Carleton University (1972-1975) and McGill University (1975-1978). In 1981, he took up a full-time position at McMaster. In 1992, he assisted in founding the Indigenous Studies Program at the university. Feit also became a member of the adjunct graduate faculty in the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University. In 2001, he was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Feit’s research has appeared in two co-edited volumes and over 75 book chapters, journal articles, reports, and expert affidavits and testimonies. Major themes in his research include colonialism and its effects, Indigenous self-governance, the basic income program for Eeyou families, and subsistence hunting.

Leon Gerstenzang was a journalist and manufacturer. He was born in 1913 in Warsaw, Poland to Anczel (Edward) Gerstenzang, a dental surgeon, and Sara née Krinkevich. As an infant he was evacuated to Irkuta, Siberia, by his mother upon the outbreak of the First World War. Upon the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, he was taken by his mother to Harbin, China. His father had been imprisoned in Warsaw, and joined the family in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China in 1920.

Gerstenzang entered British Tientsin Grammar School in 1921 and graduated in 1929 with a Cambridge School Certificate. In 1930, he joined the British daily newspaper, Peking & Tientsin Times as proof-reader and cub reporter. In 1932 he left the for the United States. as a student and entered Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York city. He was accepted by New York University’s School of Journalism. Owing to the Depression of 1932 he could not maintain student status and finish college. He returned to Tientsin in late 1932 and rejoined the editorial staff of the newspaper, where he established a Sunday edition of the Peking & Tientsin Times. He married Rachel Lili Tunik in 1938. In 1939 he joined Reuters Ltd. in Tientsin as News Editor and Correspondent.

From the end of 1935 to the end of 1941, Gerstenzang served as a senior Lance Corporal in the British Municipal Emergency Corps during the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Together with other Reuters staff, he was imprisoned by the Japanese during the occupation of Tientsin, for 100 days. At the close of the war, he resumed work as Manager for Reuters in 1945 until the Chinese Communists entered the city in January 1949 and banned foreign correspondents’ operation of news agencies which resulted in the Reuters office being closed. In mid-1949, Gerstenzang moved to Hong Kong and resided at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. He left Hong Kong in late 1950 for Sydney, N.S.W., upon receiving Australian immigration, where he covered under his own name for Reuters and Australian Associated Press.

In 1952, Leon and Lili Gerstenzang travelled to Toronto, Canada, and received their Landed Immigration status in 1953. They continued to live in Toronto until their deaths.

Gerstenzang worked in various manufacturing businesses and Real Estate in Canada after 1953. He joined the Ripley Manufacturing Co., Toronto, and subsequently became the President of the Canadian branch of the Q-Tip Corporation.

He died in Toronto in 2005.

Born in the Netherlands in 1938, Marianne Brandis (full last name: “Brender à Brandis”) immigrated with her family in 1947 to Terrace, BC and currently lives in Stratford, Ontario. She was educated at UBC, St. Francis Xavier University, and McMaster University from which she graduated with a BA in 1960 and MA in 1964.

Brandis worked for a time as a copywriter for CKOC in Hamilton and CBC in Toronto in the 1960s. She also taught creative writing and English literature at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (Ryerson University) from 1967 until she resigned in 1989 at the age of 50 after which she pursued writing full-time. She continues to teach creative writing and memoir writing workshops.

Brandis’ writings contain diverse topics and include historical fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and biography genres. In her historical works, she deals with significant events and the private and daily lives of individuals. Perhaps best known are Brandis’ historical books for younger readers which were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and out of these, The Tinderbox (1982), The Quarter-Pie Window (1985), The Sign of the Scales (1990), Fire Ship (1992), and Rebellion (1996) received various awards and commendations. Brandis’ most recent projects have been creative non-fiction and other life-writing works. Brandis has collaborated extensively with her brother Gerard Brender à Brandis, the wood engraver and bookwright, and whose fonds is also at McMaster.

Alvin Lee was born in Woodville, Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto where he received his Bachelors of Arts, a Master of Arts in English and a Ph.D in English in 1961. Lee began a teaching career at McMaster University as Assistant Professor of English in 1960 and progressed to Associate Professor, Assistant Dean, School of Graduate Studies, Dean of Graduate Studies, Vice-President, Academic and President and Vice-Chancellor from 1980 to 1990. Alvin Lee is the author of several books and articles on Old English literature and is a specialist in Middle English literature. He is currently Professor Emeritus, Department of English, at McMaster University. He served as General Editor of the 30-volume Collected Works of Northrop Frye, published by the University of Toronto Press between 1996 and 2012.

Dr. Lee was elected a Member of the Royal Commonwealth Society (England) in 1962. He was appointed Honorary Professor of English, University of Science and Technology, Beijing and Honorary Professor at Peking University in 1993. He was recognized by the Hamilton Gallery of Distinction in 1996 and achieved the City of Hamilton Award for Lifetime Distinction in Support of the Arts in 2015. He is also the Governor of the Lee Academy (a private elementary school in Lynden, Ontario); and served as Vice-Chair of the McMaster Museum of Art (1998-2005).

Lucy Catherine Russell was a granddaughter of Bertrand Russell, philosopher and peace activist. Her father, John Conrad Russell, was Bertrand Russell’s first son from his marriage to Dora Black. Her mother, Susan Lindsay, was the daughter of American poet Vachel Lindsay.

Lucy was the third daughter of John and Susan. By the time of Lucy’s birth on July 21, 1948, her parents’ relationship had already begun to deteriorate. Lucy’s family initially lived in a small flat in Cambrian Road, Richmond, but by 1950, they had moved to the main floor of 41 Queen’s Road in Richmond with Bertrand Russell (Monk 316-317). In December 1952, Bertrand Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, and soon after she moved into the Queen’s Road home, Lucy’s parents moved out of it (Monk 355).

By the time she was five years old, Lucy and her sisters had become the subjects of a bitter family custody dispute. Bertrand and Edith Russell, with whom the children still lived, initially desired to have the girls made wards of the court on the basis of parental neglect, an initiative which was strongly opposed by Dora Russell (née Black), their grandmother (Monk 356). By 1954, Lucy’s parents had separated, and John, her father, had been hospitalized following a schizophrenic breakdown (Monk 359-360). Subsequently, John Russell moved into his mother Dora’s home, Carn Voel in Cornwall, where he would remain for much of his life.

John and Susan formally divorced in 1955, and John Russell retained custody of the children. However, the children remained in the care of Bertrand and Edith Russell (Monk 361), with much tension ensuing in subsequent years over parental visitation rights.

Lucy attended Kingsmuir School, a boarding school in Sussex, while the family resided at 41 Queen’s Road (Griffin 503). In 1956, when Lucy was eight years old, Bertrand and Edith Russell moved the family to Plas Penrhyn, their home in Wales. Following this move, Lucy and her sisters were sent to Moreton Hall, a private girls’ boarding school in Shropshire (Monk 370; Griffin 503). Near Russell’s home in Wales lived the Cooper-Willis family: mother Susan Williams-Ellis, a renowned potter; father Euan Cooper-Willis, and daughters Sian and Anwyl, who were close friends of Lucy and her sisters. Sian Cooper-Willis would later become a custodian of Lucy Russell’s papers.

In 1960, Bertrand and Edith Russell sought to further secure the girls’ situation by seeking legal custody of them (Monk 394). A protracted custody battle ensued, and in the end, Bertrand and Edith won full custody (1961), with John Russell retaining visitation rights (Monk 400).

Lucy excelled in her studies at Moreton Hall, demonstrating interest in mathematics (Monk 493). In the summer of 1962, at the age of fourteen, she left Moreton Hall to continue her studies at Dartington Hall, a progressive co-educational boarding school in Dartington, Devon. Lucy began to experience academic difficulties at this point, though her instructors noted her aptitude for languages (Monk 493). Lucy’s papers reveal her nascent interest in poetry, literature, and art as well.

In the summer of 1965, Lucy had withdrawn from Dartington Hall, focusing her efforts instead on private mathematics coaching and passing her A-level exams (Monk 493). In subsequent years, Lucy made several failed attempts to pass her A-level examinations and her entrance examinations to Oxford and Cambridge. It was not until 1970 that she was accepted on a course in anthropology and politics at the University of Kent (Monk 501).

Bertrand Russell passed away in February 1970, when Lucy was twenty years old. By 1972, Lucy had abandoned her latest round of university studies, and after a peripatetic period, she was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia (Monk 501; Moorehead 551). Following her release from hospital, she returned briefly to stay with Dora Russell and her father in Cornwall. On 11 April 1975, Lucy travelled by bus to a graveyard in the village of St. Buryan (Cornwall), where she died by self-immolation. She was, at the time of her death, twenty-six years old (Monk 501-502).

Eugene McNamara was born on March 18th, 1930 in Oak Park, Illinois. He received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from DePaul University in 1953 and 1955, respectively. He completed a Ph.D. in English Literature at Northwestern University in 1964. He began teaching in the Department of English at the University of Windsor in 1959. He was one of the first two instructors in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English.

He has published in the genres of poetry, short stories and novels. Four of his short stories were selected for inclusion in the annual Best Canadian Stories. One of these stories appeared in Best American Short Stories in 1975. He founded the University of Windsor Review, now known as The Windsor Review in 1965 and was editor until 1987. His publications include Passages and Other Poems (1972), Screens (1977), The Moving Light (1986), Keeping In Touch: New & Selected Poems (1998), Waterfalls (2000), Grace Notes: Poems New & Selected (2004) and a novel, The Orphans Waltz (2008).

Eugene McNamara was Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Windsor and was active in the arts community. He passed away on September 17th, 2016.

Matthew Arnold, (1822–1888), poet, writer, and inspector of schools, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His best-known work is the poem "Dover Beach". He died on 15 April 1888 in Liverpool.

Frank S. Wood, born in March 1871, emigrated from Yorkshire, England to Hamilton, Ontario in 1888. It was during that year he collected a small lithic celt from a site in Yorkshire, which marked the beginning of his collecting career. The Wood artifact collection consists of approximately 10,007 specimens. The collection was amassed by Frank S. Wood and continued by his son Alfred E. Wood. Importantly, Wood collected a Palaeo-indigineous fluted point in Binbrook Township. This projectile point is one of the oldest found in Ontario (8000-6000 BCE). The Wood artifact collection was donated to McMaster University in 1973 (housed in the Ethnography Collection in the Department of Anthropology).

In 1894, Wood participated in the “Around the Bay Road Race”, winning second place behind W.R. Marshall. Frank S. Wood’s final race occurred as part of the 1 July 1 1927 Confederation Jubilee celebrations in Hamilton. He entered as the most senior participant at 56 years old.

Katharine Birkmyre was the daughter of Rev. Canon Thomas Skelton (1834-1915). She was married to Henry Birkmyre who was possibly connected to the firm of Birkmyre Brothers, a jute and linen manufacturer. The couple lived at 67 Cadogan Gardens in London.