Dorothy Jean Ross was born in Montreal in 1909 and earned her B.A. from McGill in 1930. In the same year she took her Interim First Class High School Diploma from Macdonald College. While teaching at Connaught School in Montreal (1931-1934) she earned her M.A. in History from McGill (1932) and was an assistant in the History Department during the 1933-1934 season, marking essays for Professor E.R. Adair. Due to a Moyse Travelling Fellowship she was able to spend the remainder of 1934 and 1935 in England conducting research for her doctoral thesis on English justices of peace in the 16th century. In 1936 she returned to Montreal and joined the staff of the Montreal High School for Girls. In 1939 she became McGill's first woman Ph.D. She became Vice-Principal of the Montreal High School for Girls (1951), Principal (1958) and retired in 1965.

Donald Proctor Ross was a Montreal notary and gentleman. He died in Montreal on May 16, 1877, at age 65.

Douglas Allen Ross took his B.Sc. (1929), his M.Sc. in Physiology (1931), and his Ph.D. (1934) at McGill and later his M.D. at the University of Chicago. He was a lecturer in Physiology at McGill from 1938-1942. During World War II, Ross was loaned to the American Government to develop a system of communication in planes which would enable the crew to hear each other over the noise of the planes. He later worked on hearing aids for American veterans who had been deafened during the war. He worked for a time with a medical appliance firm, on the staff of the University of Tennessee, and at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designing equipment which used radio-active materials for medical purposes.