Ellen Maud Freeman Trotter was born on June 7, 1860, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

She was an educator and editor. She received her education at Horton Collegiate Academy, Acadia Seminary, Wolfville, and Fredericton Normal School. She taught school in Fredericton and Saint John before attending Wellesley College in Boston for two years. In 1885, she became Principal of Woodstock College, Ontario. After she married Rev. Thomas Trotter, minister of Woodstock Baptist Church, she accompanied him to Wolfville following his appointment as President of Acadia University. After his death, she moved to Toronto in 1919 and served as the 1st Dean of Wallingford Hall at McMaster University in Toronto for ten years. For fifteen years, Mrs. Trotter served as editor of The Canadian Missionary Link; a magazine published by the Baptist Women's Mission Board. She was also editor of the foreign news section of the successor publication The Link and Visitor until 1934.

In 1887, she married Rev. Thomas Trotter (1853-1918). Their son Bernard Freeman Trotter (1890–1917) was a Canadian soldier-poet, the author of a collection of poems "A Canadian Twighlight and Other poems of War and of Peace” (1917). She died on October 13, 1938, in Toronto, Ontario.