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People, organizations, and families
Person · 1779-1875

Captain Thomas Gummersall Anderson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs (1830-1845), was born at Sorel, Quebec, on November 12, 1779, the son of Captain Samuel Anderson, of the Royal Regiment of New York. His first wife was Mar-pi-ya-ro-to-win (Grey Cloud), a descendent of Sioux Chief Wahpasha, and they had three children; his second wife was Elizabeth Ann Hamilton (1796-1858). After serving an apprenticeship with a merchant at Kingston, Upper Canada, he went into the fur trade at Michilimackinac; and in 1814 was in command of a party of volunteers that re-took Prairie-du Chien from the Americans. After the War he was appointed as an officer of the Indian Department, with the rank of Captain. He was stationed in turn at Drummond Island, Penetanguishene, Coldwater, and Manitoulin Island. In 1845 he succeeded Colonel S.P. Jarvis as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Canada West; and he held this post until his retirement in 1858. He died at Port Hope on February 10, 1875.

Anderson, Joyce
Person

Joyce Anderson (nee Grant) was born 13 May 1938 in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. She married Douglas Anderson in 1960 and they lived in Bobcaygeon on their farm, “Sunnybreeze,” The Andersons had two children, Kim and Mark. Joyce Anderson worked as a music and piano teacher. Her mother was a Cairnduff.

Cameron, David R.
Person · 1941 -

Professor David R. Cameron (1941- ) was born in British Columbia and educated at the U.B.C. and the London School of Economics. He came to Trent University in Ontario to teach in the Political Studies department and became Chair of the department and Dean of Arts and Science. He was the Director of Research for the Pepin-Robarts Task Force on Canadian Unity. He held several senior government positions including Deputy Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs in the Ontario Government and Special Advisor to Premier David Peterson on Constitutional Reform. He was appointed Vice President of Institutional Relations and is a Professor of Political Science now at the University of Toronto. He is the author of many articles and several books including "Nationalism and Self-Determination and the Quebec Question" and "Taking Stock: Canadian Studies in the Nineties."

Person · 1859-1950

Frederick Montague de la Fosse was born in England in 1859. He emigrated to Canada when he was 18 years old and worked on a farm in the Muskoka's. He built a house before 1882 and started to clear the land on which he lived. He left in 1883 for the prairies where he joined a surveying team. The story of his adventures in the west are written in "The Western Reminiscences of F.M. de la Fosse". He married Mary Jane Graham Bell in 1885 and they had four children: Margerie, Francis, Bartholomew and Philippa. Between 1885 and 1896 they lived near Lake Rousseau in Stisted Township, since de la Fosse's house had burnt down the year he had returned and before he was able to move into it. He remarried, Amy Vernon Halliday, after his first wife died. Eventually the family moved to Toronto where de la Fosse became the recording secretary of Trinity College. He published many poems in "The Trinity Review" during this time. He moved to the Peterborough area and became the copy editor of "The Peterborough Examiner" from 1907 to 1910. On December 5, 1910 F.M. de la Fosse accepted the position of Peterborough's first public librarian. In 1946 he retired from the library. Under the pen name of Roger Varden, he published "English Bloods" in 1930 which was a story of his arrival in Canada and the subsequent years. He also privately published books of his poetry: "Verses Gay and Grave" in 1937 and "A Dream and an Allegory" in 1944. He also wrote on a wide range of topics including "Centenary History of St. John's Anglican Church, 1827-1927" which was published in 1927. In 1948 he sent a poem to Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II) for which he received an acknowledgement from her. Frederick Monatague de la Fosse died at Peterborough on September 26, 1950. (Taken from: Rahmel, Fern. "A Literary Discovery: the 'western reminiscences' of F.M. de la Fosse, Peterborough's first librarian." Occasional paper. Peterborough Historical Society, 1994.)

Dunlop, Heather
Person

Heather Dunlop graduated with a M.A. degree in Canadian Heritage and Development Studies from Trent University in May 1998.

Campbell, George
Person

George Campbell was a farmer who lived in Norland, Ontario, during the 1870's.

Belcher, John E.
Person

John E. Belcher was an architect, civil engineer, and a surveyor who lived in the Peterborough region at the turn of the century. He was involved in the construction of the Chemong Floating Bridge, the Peterborough Public Library, the Bradburn Opera House, the Wallis memorial in St. John's Church, the Canadian General Electric Company and the Anglican Christ Church in Bobcaygeon, Ontario.

Bell, Robert
Person

Robert Bell was a Provincial Land Surveyor working in Canada West during the late 1840's. He was responsible for the survey of Bell's Line, a road which was never constructed, which was to have run westward through the northern portions of Peterborough and Hastings Counties, from the Madawaska River to Bracebridge. The Peterson Road, which was surveyed and constructed a few years later, eight miles south of and parallel to the Bell's Line survey, was considered to be a more suitable route for east-west travel in the region. It is thought that Bell was born in Ireland in 1821 and that he later emigrated with his parents to New York. In 1843, Bell obtained land in Kemptville, Canada West, and worked in and around Bytown (Ottawa) for three years. In 1847, he was instructed to begin the Bell's Line survey. Upon the completion of the survey in September 1848, Bell retired from surveying; and the following year, he purchased an Ottawa newspaper which was to become the Ottawa Citizen. He died in 1873 at the age of 52.

Bird, Hazel
Person · 1920-2009

Hazel Bird was a recognized naturalist known especially for her work in restoring the bluebird population of Northumberland County. Born in Northumberland County, Bird served in World War II where she met her husband, Tom Bird. The couple resided in Harwood, Ontario and had seven children; in the 1950s Tom Bird died due to a boating accident. In the 1960s, Hazel Bird initiated the Eastern Bluebird restoration project in Northumberland County and continued to coordinate and lead this project for almost 40 years; with the help of volunteers, “The Bluebird Lady,” as she was sometimes referred to, erected, monitored, and recorded information about the bird boxes until an accident in 2004 prevented her from doing so and resulted in the termination of the project. Bird was involved in many naturalist organizations in Ontario including the Ontario Outdoors Educator’s Council, The Willow Beach Field Naturalists and the Willow Beach Young Naturalists. She also taught classes, first as a volunteer, and then as a paid employee at the Laurie Lawson Outdoor Education Centre in Cobourg and was recognized for her work in 1996 receiving the Ontario Eastern Bluebird Society Conservation Award. In that same year it was announced by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife of Canada that the Eastern Bluebird, which had been designated as a “rare bird” since 1984, was no longer considered a species at risk. Bird died 1 February 2009. In 2012 the Nature Conservancy of Canada designated the Hazel Bird Nature Reserve in Ontario’s Rice Lake Plains in her honour.

Boyd, Mossom
Person · 1815-1883

Mossom Boyd was born in India and son of Gardiner Boyd who was Superior Officer to Colonel Blackall, came to the Bobcaygeon region in Verulam Township in 1833. Over the years, he built up a successful lumber mill, and became one of the most prominent men in the community. When he died in 1883, he was survived by two sons, Mossom M. and W.T.C. Boyd who carried on the family business.

Boyd, Winnett
Person · 1916-2017

Winnett Boyd was born on October 17, 1916 in North Wales where his father, Winnett Wornibe Boyd (of Bobcaygeon, Ontario), was serving in the First World War. His mother, Marjorie Sterne St. George, was American. In 1917, Marjorie and the children moved to Canada. Growing up, Boyd lived in Bobcaygeon, Port Hope, Bermuda and Toronto. In 1935, he began studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto's School of Practical Science. He graduated with a B.Sc. in 1939 and was offered a staff scholarship by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. He completed one year of graduate studies at MIT as well as a Teaching Assistantship.

Between 1940 and 1943, Boyd worked in the field of engineering for the Demerara Bauxite Company in British Guiana and the Aluminum Company of Canada Limited in Montreal and Shawinigan Falls. In the fall of 1934, Boyd joined the Royal Canadian Navy, and was soon seconded to the National Research Council. In 1943 and 1944, Boyd studied jet engine design in the United Kingdom on behalf of the National Research Council. In 1944, he began working for Turbo Research Limited and was in charge of the Engine Design Section. Turbo Research Limited had been requested by the federal government to begin building a jet engine for Canada. Boyd and his team began designing the TR.3 in 1945. Soon, this project was abandoned in favour of a smaller design, the TR.4, which was later named the Chinook. In 1946, Turbo Research Limited was sold to A.V. Roe Canada. Boyd was transferred to A.V. Roe, where he continued work on the TR.4 as Chief Designer of the Gas Turbine Division and Assistant Chief Engineer. In March of 1948, the Chinook Engine was officially started for the first time. Concurrently, Boyd designed the TR.5, which was later named the Orenda Engine. He began the design of this larger engine in September of 1946, and it ran for the first time in February of 1949. Boyd resigned from A.V. Roe in 1950.

In 1951, Boyd founded Winnett Boyd Limited as a commission agency of consulting engineers. At about the same time, he started working as a Consulting Engineer for the C.D. Howe Company. At C.D. Howe, Boyd was the Chief Mechanical Engineer, and was responsible for the design of the National Research Universal (NRU) Nuclear Reactor. The NRU is currently operating at the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited plant in Chalk River, Ontario. The NRU is still considered one of the world's finest research reactors and produces a large supply of isotopes used for medical reasons.

In 1956, Boyd began designing the Daniels-Boyd Nuclear Steam Generator (D-BNSG) based on Farrington Daniels' work. After two years of promoting the D-BNSG, the project was dismissed. This led to Boyd's involvement in the nuclear controversy with his paper, "The Promise and the Prospects" in 1959.

In 1959, Boyd became the first President of Arthur D. Little's Canadian affiliate in Toronto. He worked for Arthur D. Little until his retirement in 1981, while maintaining his work at Winnett Boyd Limited. Boyd ran for the Progressive-Conservative Party in the 1972 General Election in the York-Scarborough Riding. He used this campaign to publicly discuss the ideology of his friend, Louis O. Kelso.
Boyd attended the Pugwash Conference in 1965 and 1967. The purpose of the Pugwash conferences is to discuss peaceful alternatives for science and international affairs. Boyd was a founding member of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, which is also concerned with world affairs.

In 1974, Boyd co-founded BMG Publishing with Kenneth McDonald and Orville Gaines. BMG published eight books pertaining to Canadian politics between 1975 and 1979.

Boyd began developing a bicycle brake in the 1970s. In the early 1990s he built bicycles called the BMG Suburban, equipped with the back-pedalling brake he invented. Boyd sells these bicycles independently.

In 1948, Boyd was the youngest-ever recipient of the University of Toronto's Engineering Alumni Medal for his accomplishments in the field of jet engine design.

In 1954, he was admitted to the grade of Associate Fellow of the Canadian Aeronautical Institute. He also received a certificate of recognition from the Corporation of Professional Engineers of Quebec in 1959.

In 1981, Boyd was inducted into the University of Toronto's Engineering Alumni Hall of Distinction.
Boyd's writings were published widely in a variety of periodicals. He also had three books published: "Personal Thoughts: A Series on the Canadian Prospect" (1966), "The National Dilemma and the Way Out" with Kenneth McDonald (1975), and "Rebel Engineer" (1998).
Winnett Boyd died in 2017 in Lindsay, Ontario.

Downes, Prentice Gilbert
Person

Prentice Gilbert Downes, born in 1909, was a school teacher from Concord, Massachusetts. He often travelled to the north during the summer and one such visit is chronicled in his book "Sleeping Island: the Story of One Man's Travels in the Great Barren Lands of the Canandian North" (1943). He died in approximately 1978.

Brown, Jennifer
Person

Professor Jennifer Stacey Harcourt Brown was born on 30 December 1940, in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown’s parents, Professor Harcourt Brown of Brown University and his wife Dorothy were good friends of Professor Kenneth and Martha Kidd, who were long associated with Trent University. Her father and Professor Kidd became friends through similar research interests. Their families visited one another throughout the summer months in Providence, Rhode Island, and at their summer island place near Perry Sound. Browns family visited the Kidds in Scarborough and later in Peterborough. Professor Jennifer Brown’s uncle, Quentin Brown, was a generous supporter of the Archives at Trent University and accessioned over 100 records into the collection.

Professor Brown was invited by Professor Kidd to participate in the Serpent Mounds archaeological dig at Rice Lake when she finished high school. She was a student digger for 10 weeks during the summer of 1958. She then went on to complete an archaeological dig in San Carlos, Guatemala, during the summer of 1959.

Professor Brown received a BA Honours in Ancient and Medieval Culture from Brown University in 1962. She received her AM in Classical Archaeology from Harvard University in 1963 and her PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1976.
Professor Brown has published many books in which one in particular has received Honourable Mention for the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. Macdonald Prize. This book is titled Strangers in Blood, published by The University of British Columbia Press.

Burnett, W.
Person

W. Burnett was a merchant and proprietor in Cobourg, Ontario, in the early 1900's.

Buxton, Roger
Person

Robin (Roger) Allan Heineky Buxton was born in London, England on January 28, 1945, the son of Adam and Beetle Buxton. He and his wife, Judy Hazlett, lived in Markham, Ontario. A PhD physicist and Chair of the Ontario Association of Remote Sensing (OARS), Buxton was also a photographer and for a 25-year period beginning in the 1970s, hiked together with his wife into the Canadian and Greenland Arctic taking photographs. Locations visited include Ellesmere Island, Auyuittuq, Soper River, Frobisher Bay, Pond Inlet and Bylot Island, Baker Lake, Clyde River, Grise Fiord, Pangnirtung, and Greenland. Along with also being a pilot, oarsman, published writer, and skater, Buxton was involved with introducing speed skating to children of the Markham area and, in 2005, was awarded the Speed Skating Canada’s National Outstanding Administrators Award for this work. Buxton was also secretary of Markham’s Parkinson Support Group and he and Hazlett trained police forces throughout Ontario to assist those with Parkinson’s disease; for this work, they were awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. Over many years, Buxton accompanied Trent Professor John Wadland on annual trips to Temagami and many of his photographs taken while on these trips are located elsewhere in Trent University Archives. He died on August 18, 2013. (Taken in part from an obituary published by Chapel Ridge Funeral Home, Markham, Ontario, and from information supplied by Professor John Wadland).

Farrar, Michael Andrews
Person

The Reverend Michael Andrews Farrar was born in England in 1814. He died in Hastings, Ontario in 1876. He was a Church of England rector in Westwood, Norwood, and Hastings, Ontario, and was an accomplished artist.

Dellamora, Richard
Person · 1944-

Professor Richard Dellamora was born in 1944 in the United States. He received his education at Yale, Cambridge, and Dartmouth College. Dellamora is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Trent University, where he also teaches in the graduate program in Culture, Theory, and Politics. He specializes in Victorian studies; history and theory of gender and sexuality; nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural studies; critical theory; queer theory; Aestheticism and the Decadence; nineteenth-century comparative arts; and opera. He is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Guggenheim Foundation. His publications include Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990); Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (1994); and three edited collections: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995); The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference (1997, co-editor with Daniel Fischlin); and Victorian Sexual Dissidence (1999). In 2004 he published Friendship's Bonds, a study of the attempt by Victorian writers (Eliot, Disraeli, Gladstone, Dickens, James and Trollope) to use the novel as a space in which to explore citizenship and political culture. In 2011, he published Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing.

Fernow, Bernhard E.
Person

Bernhard Edouard Fernow was born on January 7, 1852, in Posen, Prussia. He was educated at the University of Kronigsberg, and served in the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War. He emigrated to the United States in 1876; and from 1886 to 1898 he was Chief of the Division of Forestry in the United States Department of Agriculture. From 1898 to 1903 he was Director of the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell University. In 1907 he became Dean of the Faculty of Forestry in the University of Toronto, and this position he retained until his retirement in 1919. He died at Toronto on February 6, 1923. In addition to many technical contributions to scientific periodicals, he was the author of Economics of Forestry, 1902; A Brief History of Forestry, 1907; and The Care of Trees in the Lawn, Park, and Street, 1910. He was an LL.D. of the University of Wisconsin and of Queen's University, Kingston. (Taken from: The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography, fourth edition. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1974.)

Graham, Duncan
Person

Duncan Graham was born October 5, 1845 in the Township of Mara, Ontario County, Canada West, to Archibald Graham and Ann McQuaig. He was the grandson of one of the early settlers, John or James Graham, natives of Scotland. He was a farmer and unmarried. He was also a Councillor, Deputy-Reeve and Reeve of Mara Township and Warden of the County of Ontario in 1896. He was elected to the House of Commons at the by-election of February 4, 1897. He was a Liberal-Independent. (Taken from: "The Parliamentary Guide, 1898-9." Winnipeg: Manitoba Free Press, 1898.)

Finnie II, Andrew
Person · 1820-1908

Andrew Finnie II was born in 1820 and emigrated from Scotland to Canada with his brothers in 1840. Around 1850, Finnie settled on Lot 12 Concession 2 in South Monaghan Township. He and his wife, Jane Chambers, had thirteen children of which eleven lived to adulthood. Some moved to Manitoba and sent photographs over the years to the family who remained on the South Monaghan homestead; the homestead to this day is still in possession of Finnie heirs. Andrew Finnie II died in 1908.

Fisher, John R.
Person

John R. Fisher was the Special Projects Planner, Planning and Research, for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. He is a graduate of Trent University.

Stevens, Henry Herbert
Person

Henry Herbert Stevens (Harry) was born December 8, 1878 in Bristol, England. In 1887 he and his father, two older brothers and a sister emigrated to Peterborough, Canada. In 1894 the family moved to Vancouver in British Columbia. A short time after this Harry met and married Gertrude Glover. Together they had 5 children: 2 boys; Francis and Douglas, and 3 girls; Majorie, Sylvia and Patricia. H.H. Stevens served with the American Army in the Boxer Rebellion. When he returned to Vancouver he went into the grocery, real estate and insurance businesses. He was elected, in 1911, to the House of Commons, for Vancouver, and remained there until 1930. He represented East Kooteney from 1930 to 1940. He held the positions of Minister of Trade (Meighan administration) in 1921 and Minister of Trade and Commerce (Bennet administration) from 1930 to 1934. He was Chairman of the Price-Spreads Commission in 1934. Due to a disagreement, with Cabinet about the findings of the commission, H.H. Stevens resigned his position and established the Reconstruction Party. In 1938 he joined the Conservative Party. H.H. Stevens was President of the Vancouver Board of Trade from 1952 to 1953. He died June 14, 1973 in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Taken from: The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 4th ed. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978.)