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Bertrand Edward Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn, was born on March 9, 1864, in London, England.

He was a physician to the British Royal Family. He graduated from University College London (B.Sc., 1879) and the Royal London Hospital (M.D., 1893). He became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons (1890), a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (1903) and worked as a physician for several years. In 1907, Dawson joined the Royal Household as a Physician-Extraordinary to King Edward VII, an office he held until 1910 when he was promoted to a Physician-in-Ordinary under King George V. In 1911, he was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (RVO). Following the outbreak of the First World War, he served on the Western Front in France from 1915 to 1919, rising to the rank of major-general. Dawson held the office of Physician-in-Ordinary to King George V until 1936. He was appointed Knight of Grace in the Venerable Order of St. John and Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1916, Knight Grand Cross of the RVO in the 1918 New Year Honours, and Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1919. In the 1920 New Year Honours, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dawson of Penn, of Penn, in the County of Buckinghamshire and became an active member of the House of Lords. In 1926, he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and, in 1929, he became a member of the Privy Council. He served as President of the Royal Society of Medicine (1928-1930) and the Royal College of Physicians (1931-1937). In the 1936 Birthday Honours, he was advanced in the peerage as Viscount Dawson of Penn, in the County of Buckingham, and remained in the Medical Households of King Edward VIII and King George VI. Dawson practised euthanasia and believed "it belongs to the wisdom and conscience of the medical profession and not to the realm of law."

In 1900, he married Minnie Ethel Yarrow (1879–1972). He died on March 7, 1945, in London, England.

Charles Carroll Dawson was born on February 4, 1833, in Nelson, Madison County, New York.

He was a bookkeeper and cashier in the book publishing house Daniel Burgess & Co. in New York City. In 1856, he worked as a bookseller, publisher, and stationer in Des Moines, Iowa where he was elected superintendent of Public Schools. He devoted himself to the duties of his office, in connection with the business of a real estate and insurance agency. He travelled extensively as an assistant state agent of the Aetna Insurance Company, Hartford, Connecticut. In 1866, he graduated from the Law School of the State University in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He accepted the position of corresponding and advertising clerk at the Congress and Empire Spring Waters that owned the spring property at Saratoga, New York. In 1869, he became a member of the board of trustees and manager of the company’s business in New York City. Since boyhood and after his father’s death in 1843, Dawson had the desire to know more about his family history. He compiled "A Collection of Family Records with Biographical Sketches and Other Memoranda of Various Families and Individuals Bearing the Name Dawson", published in Albany, N.Y. in 1874.

In 1856, he married Jeannette Margaret Simonson (1829-1883) and in 1887, he remarried Katharine A.D. (1850-1929). He died on November 5, 1916, in Addison, Steuben County, New York.

Cristall Margaret Dawson was the daughter of William Bell Dawson and Florence Jane Ellliot Dawson, born 22 October 1898. She died in Montreal on 13 September 1980.

Eva, the last born of the nine children of the Dawson family, was considerably younger than most of the others. Born in 1865, she was closest in age to Rankine, who was her companion as a child, and she often defended him when her siblings were impatient with his erratic behavior. She claimed that his unstable behavior dated from his experience of being lost in the woods during a trip to the west, which imbalanced him, altering his character and producing “peculiarities of manners and ways.” Eva grew up largely in the east wing of the Arts building at McGill where her family had moved in 1855 before she was born. In 1890, she married Hope Tweedale Atkin (1856-1921), a Cambridge graduate from Cheshire, England. After the wedding in Montreal, they returned to Birkenhead in Cheshire where their first child was born in 1891, and in 1894 they moved to Lancashire where they resided for many years. They had three children: Sylvia Lois Dawson Atkin (1891-1968), Grace Margaret Dawson Atkin (born in 1892), and George Fawson Hope Atkin (1896-1916), who was killed during World War I.

When the family was in turmoil concerning the publication of her father’s biography after his death, she tried to convince them to cease the quarreling with Rankine in the interests of honouring Sir William and comforting their mother, but the older siblings maintained their opposition and she wound up siding with them.

When their mother died in 1913 she willed Birkenshaw, the family’s summer home in Little Metis to her daughter, Clare, who in turn willed it to Eva and her niece Lois Harrington. Eva died in 1915 in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales.

George Geoffrey (formerly Robinson) Dawson was born on October 25, 1874, in Skipton, Yorkshire, England.

He was a British newspaper editor. He graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1897) and in 1898, he was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He entered the civil service at the Post Office and, in 1899, he transferred to the South African Department of the Colonial Office under the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. In 1901, he was promoted assistant private secretary to Chamberlain and later, he obtained the same position with the High Commissioner of South Africa, the imperialist Lord Milner. He participated in establishing the British administration in South Africa in the aftermath of the Boer War. Upon his return to England in 1911, he became a full-time staff member of The Times, and, in 1912, he was appointed its editor. After disagreements with the owner Lord Northcliffe, he stepped down as editor in 1919 but returned after Northcliffe's death in 1923 and stayed until his retirement in 1941. In 1917, he assumed by royal licence the name and arms of Dawson via his mother's eldest sister, Margaret Jane Dawson. In 1926, he was made an honorary Fellow of Magdalen College and received an honorary degree of DCL in 1934.

In 1919, he married Margaret Cecilia Lawley (1889–1969). He died on November 7, 1944, in London, England.

The geologist and explorer George Mercer Dawson was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, and moved to Montréal in 1855 when his father, John William Dawson, became Principal of McGill. At the age of eleven, he contracted an illness which resulted in permanent spinal deformity and the stunting of his growth, but he vigorously resisted the role of invalid and completed his education under private tuition.

After a year as a partial student at McGill, he enrolled in the Royal School of Mines, London, whence he graduated in 1872 with highest honours and the title of Associate. After a brief period surveying mines in Nova Scotia and teaching chemistry at Morrin College, Québec, he was appointed geologist and botanist to the British North American Boundary Commission, and made his first surveying trip to the Canadian West.

His travels were even more extensive after 1875, when he became geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada; they resulted in numerous published reports and articles, primarily on the mineral resources of the Prairies, northern British Columbia and the Yukon, but also on the botany, geography, and ethnography of this region.

In 1883, he became assistant-director and, in 1895, Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, which he headed until his death in 1901. He assisted in negotiating treaties affecting natural resources, notably as Commissioner in the Bering Sea seal inquiry of 1891-92, for which work he was awarded the C.M.G. A member of numerous scientific associations, Dawson was President of the Royal Society of Canada in 1893.