William Gossip was born in 1809 in Plymouth, England.

He was a publisher, bookseller, and journalist. In the early 1820s, he moved with his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he received his education. In 1831, he moved to Pictou where he published and edited the Pictou Observer. In 1834, he discontinued the Observer, returned to Halifax, and established stationery, bookselling, and publishing business there. With his brother-in-law John Charles Coade as a partner, he began a new weekly, the Times, the most influential of the Conservative newspapers in Nova Scotia. In 1847, they started another more partisan weekly, the Standard and Conservative Advocate. Between 1848 and 1858, Gossip published the Anglican Church Times and continued with his stationery and bookselling business. He was a member of the Nova Scotian Institute of Natural Science and served as the first editor of the institute’s annual Proceedings and Transactions (1863-1889). He published several papers on the anthropology and geology of Nova Scotia.

In 1832, he married Anne Catherine Coade. He died on April 5, 1889, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Rosamund Brunel Horsley Gotch was born on February 27, 1864, in Cranbrook, Kent, England.

She was a talented British costume designer, illustrator, and writer. Her father was the academic painter of genre and historical scenes, illustrator, and designer of the first Christmas card John Callcott Horsley (1817-1903), and her grandfather was musician William Horsley (1774-1858). She was the Head of the Costume Department at the Royal College of Music, designing clothes for operas performed between the wars. In 1937, Gotch published a biography of Maria Callcott, “Maria, Lady Callcott: the Creator of ‘Little Arthur’.” In 1938, she published “Mendelssohn and His Friends in Kensington Gardens: Letters from Fanny and Sophy Horsley, Written 1833-36,” a collection of her aunts’ letters describing the flirtatious composers’ visits to their family home in the 1830s.

In 1887, she married Dr. Francis Gotch (1853–1913), F.R.S., neurophysiologist and Professor of Physiology at University College Liverpool and Oxford University. She died on January 22, 1949, in Oxford, England.

Alice Julia Hall was born on 14 July 1805 in Montreal to Joseph Hall ad Nancy Kneeland. She married Dr. Daniel Gould, a medical doctor, on 12 August 1825 in Andover, Massachusetts, and moved with him to Boston. They had at least three children together, Rebecca, Alice, and John. She died of influenza and bronchitis in Boston on 1 March 1901.