Dr. Janet Donalda McFee was born on October 29, 1863, in Beauharnois County, Quebec.
She entered McGill College in 1884 as one of the college's first women undergraduates. A brilliant student, she became especially interested in philosophy, which then included psychology and she graduated in 1888 (B.A.). She continued her studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Later she went on to work with the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig, Germany, and in 1895, she became the first woman graduate of McGill University to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Zürich, Switzerland. In the 1900s, she worked as a school teacher in New York and translated texts from German to English and vice versa. In the early 1920s, she returned to Montreal, Quebec. She and her twin sisters made a world tour shortly before World War II and traversed across the widest part of India in 1937. At the age of 93, she took her first flight and went to Bermuda for the winter. She suddenly took ill the following spring and died there on March 5, 1957, in Tucker's Town. She is buried in Montreal, Quebec.
McFarlane & Gibb were Montreal tailors. Founded in 1784 by Benaiah Gibb (1755-1826) and Peter McFarlane (1725-1811), McFarlane & Gibb specialized in ready-to-wear clothing for men, especially for wealthy merchants and other influential members of Montreal society. Gibb was born in England to a family of Scottish origins, trained as a tailor in England, and migrated to Quebec in 1774. He worked on his own for a time, but in 1784, he went into partnership with Peter McFarlane, who had also had his own business. They worked together until October 1790, when McFarlane retired. Gibb continued to run a business on his own, by the two men continued to have a friendship, and McFarlane lived with Gibb in his later years. Gibb retired in 1815, and his sons took over the business.
David William McFadden was born on October 11, 1940, in Hamilton, Ontario.
He was a Canadian poet, novelist, and travel writer. He did not go to university but joined the Hamilton Spectator as a proofreader in the 1960s, working his way to a reporter. Following the publication of his first six poetry collections and the experimental novel “The Great Canadian Sonnet” (1974), McFadden left the Hamilton Spectator in 1976 to begin freelance editing and writing. In the 1980s, he published prolifically, including the Writer’s Block column in the Quill and Quire. He served as contributing editor for SwiftCurrent, Canadian Art, Quill and Quire and Hamilton This Month. He became writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in 1978 and instructor in the writing program of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, B.C., from 1979 to 1982. He wrote poems that balanced an account of the daily life of ordinary people with a larger, metaphysical vision influenced by British Romantic poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman. McFadden wrote more than 20 books of poetry, three novels and several travel books. In 2013, he won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection of poems "What’s the Score?". In 2014, he published a short memoir in Toronto Life about being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
He was married to Merlin Homer. He died on June 6, 2018, in Toronto, Ontario.
Allan G. McEwan, a midshipman in the Royal Navy, served on the battle cruiser H.M.S. Invincible in the waters off the Falkland Islands when she came under German fire at the time of the Battle of the Falkland Islands on December 8, 1914.
