Robert Kidston was born on June 29, 1852, in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

He was a Scottish botanist and paleobotanist. He was educated at Stirling High School. He began a career in banking but, having gained independent wealth, he was able to focus on botany and studied at the University of Edinburgh. In the 1880s, he catalogued fossil plants for several important institutions, including the British Museum, and served as honorary paleobotanist to the British Geological Survey. He served as a senior officer of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1908, he was awarded an honorary degree of LL.D from the University of Glasgow and in 1921, the honorary degree of DSc from Manchester University. In over 180 scientific papers he laid the foundations for a modern understanding of the taxonomy and paleobiology of Devonian and Carboniferous plants. His expertise was critical to the research and curation of the Geological Survey and British Museum (Natural History). His definitive work was “The Fossil Plants of the Carboniferous Rocks of Great Britain” published in six parts 1923-1925 and completed after his death.

In 1898, he married Agnes Marion Christian Oliphant (1872–1950). He died on July 13, 1924, in Bridgend, Glamorganshire, Wales.

Harriet Cowles Swift was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1855 married William Judah Keyser, born in nearby Norwalk. The Keyser family was among the founding members of the community of Milton in Santa Rosa County, Florida, where William became a lumber baron, owning many mills and exporting as far as Baghdad. They subsequently lived in Pensacola where the business, Keyser, Judah & Co. was based and where they became prominent members of the community. When her husband died in 1877, her son, William Swift Keyser, having graduated from Yale in 1878, returned to Pensacola to head the flourishing business. In 1910, his mother, one of the town’s most prolific builders, bought up an area on South Palafox Street that had been the site for the Sisters of Mercy Convent School; she built most of the buildings put up there shortly before her death. One of the buildings is known as the Keyser building, and upstairs houses Keyser Hall.