Henry Lyman was born in Derby, Vermont, in 1813 and came to Montreal in 1816. He was educated at Workman’s School in Montreal and at Amherst Academy, MA. Henry operated the chemist business Wm. Lyman & Co. from 1836 with his brothers William (1794-1857) and Benjamin (1810-1878) until William’s retirement in 1855.

Henry Herbert Lyman was born on December 21, 1854, in Montreal, Quebec.

He was a businessman and amateur entomologist. He studied at West End Academy, the Montreal High School, and McGill University (B.A. and M.A.). Together with his father Henry Lyman (1813-1897), they owned Lyman, Sons & Co., the largest pharmaceutical company in Canada. He served as the Governor of the Montreal General Hospital and the Director of the British and Colonial Press Service. He was also involved in the Royal Geographical Society. Despite his many business commitments, he still made time to follow his primary interest as a pioneer amateur entomologist, studying and collecting Lepidoptera. His extensive collection was bequeathed to McGill University where Lyman’s legacy lives on at the university through the Lyman Entomological Museum and Research Laboratory and the entomological literature collection, known as the Lyman Collection, housed at the Macdonald Campus Library.

In 1912, he married Florence Holwell Kirkby (1877–1914). They both perished on May 29, 1914, during the shipwreck of the Empress of Ireland in the Saint Lawrence River, the worst peacetime marine disaster in Canadian history.

Gian Lyman was born in Montreal on 3 January, 1931. She obtained a Licentiate in piano pedagogy at the Royal Schools of Music (London) in 1948, and became an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto in piano performance the following year. She then studied composition (B.Mus, 1954) and organ (L.Mus, 1954) at McGill University.
From 1951 to 1959 Gian Lyman worked in the Montreal region as a choir director, church organist, and an organ recitalist. In this last capacity she was frequently heard between 1953 and 1962 on Canadian radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Radio-Canada). From 1959 until her death in April 1974, Gian Lyman was an active participant in the North American early music scene, playing viola da gamba and, on at least one occasion, violone. Sheappeared with many early music ensembles and musical organizations including the Montreal Consort of Ancient Instruments (1959-1969), Cambridge Consort (1964-1974; winner of the 1973 Naumberg Chamber Music Award), Boston Camerata (1966-1974), Cambridge Society of Early Music (concerts in 1966, 1968, 1970-71, 1973), and the Brandeis Chamber Orchestra (1973-74). Also during this time, Gian Lyman gave recitals in Toronto and Montreal for the CBC and Radio Canada, and performed as a chamber musician with Robert Koff, Louis Bagger, John Gibbons, Alan Curtis, Joshua Rifkin, Kenneth Gilbert, Bernard Krainis, Jean Hakes, Joe Iadone, Mario Duchenes, Michel DeBost, and Bert Turetsky, among others.
Gian Lyman’s recording career included works from the Spanish Renaissance, the court and chapel of Henry VIII, and compositions by Antoine Forqueray, Guillaume Dufay, François Couperin, Jean Philippe Rameau, and, as a member of the Ensemble baroque de Montréal, Marin Marais. These recordings were released, variously, on the Vox, Turnabout, Nonesuch, Harmonia Mundi, London (Canada), Janus, and the Musical Heritage Society labels.
From 1954 to 1974, Gian Lyman taught at several educational institutions of note: McGill University (1954-64, instructor in piano, organ and theory), Longy School of Music (1966-73, viola da gamba, and director of the Collegium choir and instrumental ensembles), L’Université Laval (1970-72, viola da gamba), and Brandeis University (1973-74, consultant, Early Music Ensemble). Additionally, she instructed at various workshops and summer schools including the Provincetown Collegium for Early Music, Cornell University Summer School for Viol Players, Saratoga Summer School for Viol Players, Emory University Early Music Workshop, Windham Collegium, and American Recorder Society (ARS) workshops in Miami, Oakland (Michigan), and Goddard College.
Gian Lyman was active as a composer during the years 1957 to 1967. Highlights include the Trio for Violin, Viola, and Piano (Brookline Library Music Association Award, 1967) and Quaternions (for flute, violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord) commissioned by the Canadian Government for performance at Expo '67.

Brothers William (1794-1857), Henry (1813-1897), and Benjamin Lyman (1810-1878) operated the chemist business Wm. Lyman & Co. from 1836 until William’s retirement in 1855. The drug shop was originally founded by their uncle, Lewis Lyman, with George Wadsworth sometime around 1800. When Lewis Lyman moved to New York in 1819, the store passed to an uncle, Samuel Hedge, and to his eldest son, William Lyman, who ran the firm as Hedge and Lyman. Younger brothers Benjamin and Henry entered the firm in 1827 and 1829 respectively.

British geologist Mary Horner, oldest child of London geologist Leonard and Ann Horner, was one of six girls in the scientific family. In 1832 she met and married the famous geologist Charles Lyell in Bonn, and the couple had a geological honeymoon in Switzerland and Italy; on their return, they settled in Bloomsbury where Charles worked to finish the third volume of his monumental “Principles of Geology.” She helped her husband with his research in many ways: her reading knowledge of French and German meant that she could translate pertinent scholarly articles for him; because of Charles’ poor eyesight, she often read aloud to him and also managed his correspondence. In addition to her research in geology, she also became interested in Conchology (study of shells). Charles was president of the Geological Society from 1835 to 1837; Mary’s father served in that same post from1845 to 1846 and from 1860 to 1861. Charles and Mary traveled together to the United States when Charles was invited to give the Lowell lectures in Boston in 1841-1842 and again in 1845-1846. The fruits of these visits were several volumes, published in 1845 and 1849, about their travels and their opinions on American social and political problems.

British botanist Katharine Horner was the fourth in a family of six daughters born in London to geologist Leonard Horner and his wife Ann. She grew up in a science-oriented family – her father sometimes brought his daughters with him to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At a visit to her sister, Mary, who was married to the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, she met his brother, Henry, and married him in 1848. She traveled to India with her husband and collected plants in the Ganges Delta as well as in Assam and the Khasia Hills ; she gave the specimens to the British Museum. Her special interest was ferns, and in 1870 she wrote the “Geographical Handbook of All the Known Ferns”; she donated her own collection of ferns to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In 1881, after her sister Mary died, she edited the two-volume “Life and Letters of Sir Charles Lyell.” In 1906, she undertook another two-volume editing job: editing the life and letters of another brother-in-law, Sir Charles J.F. Bunbury, husband of her sister Frances.

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell was one of the foremost scientists of his Victorian era, and a strong influence on other scientists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Florentino Angelino. The son of a naturalist, his first hobby was butterflies. He entered Oxford at 19, earning a B.A. with honors in 1819 before moving to London to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1825.
In 1832 he married Mary Horner and their long honeymoon included geological excursions in Switzerland. Geology took over as a career: he began teaching at King’s College in London and was soon traveling and lecturing in Eastern America and Canada. In his work he was influenced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, William Buckland, and above all James Hutton. Lyell expounded Hutton's doctrine of “uniformitarianism” in his own "Principles of Geology." Uniformitarianism is the idea that the earth has been shaped entirely by slow moving forces still at work, and acting over a very long time frame, as opposed to catastrophism which envisions disastrous upheavals as forming the planet.
Lyell became close friends with Charles Darwin whose ideas on evolution seemed to be the biological equivalent of geological uniformitarianism
A very religious man, Lyell had difficulty reconciling his beliefs with Darwin’s theory of natural selection but the two continued to be friends.
He was knighted in 1848.