Ramsay Traquair (1874-1952) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the first child of Ramsay Heatley Traquair, a distinguished scientist and curator of the Natural History collection of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh and the Irish-born Phoebe Anna Traquair, a talented painter, illustrator and decorative artist closely connected with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Traquair came to Canada in 1913, armed with a well rounded Edinburgh education (Edinburgh University and the School of Applied Arts, now the Royal College of Art), a teaching experience at the Royal College of Arts where, in 1908 he became head of its newly established day course in Architecture, and a series of local apprenticeships and professional associations, first with Stewart Henbest Capper (1889-1925) and later with Sir Robert Lorimer (1864-1929), Arthur George Sydney Mitchell (1856-1930) and George Wilson (1845-1912). His own Edinburgh practice, which he set up in 1905, was brief; his most notable buildings being the First Church of Christ Scientist (1911) on Inverleith Terrace and the Skirling House for Lord Carmichael of Skirling in Peeblesshire (1908). When, in 1912, Traquair applied for the Macdonald Chair in Architecture at McGill University, he promised “to regard teaching as my life’s work with only so much practice as is necessary to keep in touch with realities.” The University, which had previously engaged in skirmishes with the energetic Percy Nobbs over the right to combine teaching with architectural practice, was eager to hire him. Traquair kept his word; the McGill University flag and its library bookplate are the only public reminders, on campus, of his talent as a designer.

Marius Barbeau was best known for his ethnological and anthropological work, having published extensively in both fields while at the National Museum of Canada from 1911 to 1949. The Rhodes scholar became a specialist in French Canadian folklore and music; in his anthropological work on Pacific Coast aboriginal peoples, he focused on the peopling of the Americas, in particular promoting the theory of migration from Siberia across the Bering Strait. He was founding secretary of the Canadian Historical Association in 1922 and a founding board member of the Canadian Geographical Society in 1929. He became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967.