Rev. Roderick Joseph MacSween was born on May 8, 1915, in North Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

He was a Canadian Catholic priest, poet, literary critic, and educator. He graduated from St. Francis Xavier University and Holy Heart Seminary in Halifax. He was ordained during the Second World War and served as a priest in White Point, Pomquet, and New Waterford. He taught English at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, for 35 years (1948-1983). In 1962, he was made chair of the Department of English. He also served as a counsellor to troubled women. In 1970, MacSween founded the Antigonish Review and established the first creative writing course in a Canadian university. A voracious reader at an early age, he accumulated a personal library of about 20,000 books. He published several books of poetry, e.g., "The Forgotten World" (1971), "The Burnt Forest (and Other Stories)" (1975), "Furiously Wrinkled" (1976), and "Called from Darkness" (1984). His biography "The Forgotten World of R.J. MacSween: A Life," written by Stewart L. Donovan, was published in 2007.

He died on October 10, 1990, in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Born in 1903, Maysie MacSporran was educated in Montreal at Miss Edgar’s private school and McGill University. She graduated with a B.A. in 1927 and an M.A. in 1930 with a thesis on James McGill. She did further graduate work at Columbia University from 1933-1934. She worked for the Library of Congress in Ottawa from 1930-1932 as the director of a Rockefeller funded microfilm project to copy sources for American history in foreign archives. Later, she worked as a teacher in Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s private school and became the headmistress. An Honorary Life member of the James McGill Society, this historical society established an annual lecture in her name after her death in 2000.

Macpherson & Crane was a forwarding firm operating in Prescott, Ontario, and Montreal, Quebec. It was founded by Samuel Crane (1794-1858) in 1831 with John Macpherson (and later David Lewis Macpherson). In 1836, the company secured a partnership with the Ottawa and Rideau Forwarding Company, which gave them a degree of monopoly on some of the most important shipping routes to the Ottawa area. In the early 1840s, the firm owned 12 steamers, 40 barges, and 5 schooners, and operated warehouses and shipyards in Montreal, Kingston, and Prescott (with an additional warehouse in Bytown). They went on to expand to Hamilton, Port Stanley, Amherstburg, Boston, and New York. In spite of its success, Macpherson and Crane sold off most of its vessels and greatly reduced their operations in 1853. The firm was bankrupted and dissolved in 1857, after one of their major debtors, Henderson and Holcomb, failed.