Eugene Perry Link was born in Paris, Illinois, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas. He graduated with a B.A. degree from the College of Emporia in 1929; three years of graduate study at the University of Chicago followed (1929-1931). In 1931 he left Chicago after winning an honours scholarship to Union Theological Seminary. He was ordained to the ministry of the Congregational Church in 1933, after which he held a succession of academic positions over four decades. Largely through part-time attendance in the late 1930s, Link obtained his Ph.D. in social history from Columbia University in 1941. Through his work, Link increasingly concentrated on those groups that have tended to suffer from the abuses of the capitalist system: laborers, women, minorities, and Third World nations. He served as a Fulbright Lecturer in India two different times (1954 and 1960) and strongly urged the United States government to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in the 1970s. Among his many publications are The Humanitarian Tradition in American Medicine, The Social Ideas of Physicians, and T.B.'s Progress: Norman Bethune as Artist.

William Lindsay was born in London on 10 May 1761, son of Alexander Lindsay and Susanna Durand. He came with his family to Quebec around 1773. He became a merchant's clerk, eventually going into business for himself, forming a partnership with William McNider. He also entered public service in 1792 as clerk assistant of the Lower Canadian House of Assembly. He was also registrar and treasurer of Trinity House at Quebec. On 17 June 1790 he married Marianne Melvin, with whom he had four children. He died in Quebec on 11 January 1834.

Mary Heloise Bagg Lindsay was born in Montreal in 1854, the daughter of Stanley Clark Bagg and Catherine Mitcheson. She married Robert Lindsay in 1881, and lived at 436 Saint-Urbain Street, in Montreal. She was heavily involved in many charities, and was Governor of the Royal Victoria Montreal Maternity Hospital and Children's Memorial Hospital.