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Jacques-Pierre de Tafannel de la Jonquière was born near Albi, France, in 1685. He joined the French navy in 1697, where he rose through the ranks and was made a captain in 1731. La Jonquière was promoted to rear-admiral of the French navy and appointed as governor general of New France in March of 1746. En route to Quebec, he was taken prisoner and only took up his post as governor general in 1749 after his liberation by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). During his tenure as governor general, he confronted increasing boundary encroachments by the British in the region of Acadia and British smuggling activity. He oversaw the construction of five forts, including Fort Rouillé on the southern shore of Lake Ontario (built in 1750 or 1751), which was designed to intercept traffic by Indigenous traders destined for the British trading post at Oswego, New York. La Jonquière is believed to have had significant ties to the fur trade, despite his political position. He died while in office on 17 March 1752.

Philippe de Lahire was born in Paris. Although he was a cartographer, he owes his reputation above all to his work in mathematics with the publication in 1673 of his Nouvelle Méthode de Géométrie pour les sections de superficies coniques et cylindriques. Elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1678, he wrote more than 80 treatises, mainly on curve and cone sections. Lahire also taught at the Collège Royal de France and at the Académie de l'Architecture.

An antiquarian and philologist, Sainte-Palaye was born in Auxerre and was privately educated. After a short period in the diplomatic service (1725-1726), he devoted himself completely to literature. He published some studies on the classics, but his most important work is on French antiquities. Sainte-Palaye wrote a glossary of Old French, became a collector of texts and was the author of some of the first research in medieval historiography. His unpublished Dictionnaire des antiquités françaises comprised 40 volumes.

Louis Prang was an American printer, lithographer and publisher of German origin. He has his start printing lithographs of buildings, maps and advertising materials in the 1860s. He was also involved in the greeting card business and the publishing of instructional books. The company merged with another firm in 1897 that then went bankrupt in 1938.