Mrs. H. V. Bignell was a Montreal mother who corresponded with Dr. Alton Goldbloom.

Caroline Beevor Bigsby was born in Claypole, England in 1792. She was the second wife of John Jeremiah Bigsby (marrying in 1838, in Newark, England). She died in London, England, in 1871.

The British physician John J. Bigsby’s carrier spanned medicine, geology and paleontology. He received his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1814. It was, however, for his work in geology rather than medicine that he became well-known. He first became interested in geology during his military service in the Cape of Good Hope in 1817, then in Upper and Lower Canada from 1818 to 1826. While stationed in Quebec, he wrote a report on the geology of Upper Canada (1819) as well as serving on the Boundary Commission (1822).
Back in Britain, he was alderman, mayor and doctor for Newark-upon-Trent in Nottinghamshire from 1827 to 1830 before moving to London. In 1850 he returned to British North America, authoring a book on his travels: "The Shoe and Canoe," and was soon submitting papers to learned societies (27 in all), as well as several monumental works. Thesaurus Siluricus (1868), a list of all fossils in Silurian formations across the world, earned him the Murchison medal in 1874 from the Geological Society of London, of which he had been a member since 1823. This was followed in 1878 by Thesaurus Devonico-Carboniferous. He was working on a third, Thesaurus Permianus, when he died. Bigsby endowed a medal in his name for the Geological Society of London to award to a person younger than 45. George Mercer Dawson, who received the Bigsby Medal in 1891, honoured him in 1878 by giving his name to Bigsby Inlet in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Elkanah Billings was born on May 5, 1820, in Ottawa, Ontario.

He was an Ontario lawyer, journalist, and renowned as the father of Canadian paleontology. In 1839, he registered as a student at the Law Society of Upper Canada, and in 1845, he was called to the Canadian bar. In 1852, he founded the journal the Canadian Naturalist and Geologist and became editor of the Bytown Citizen (later renamed the Ottawa Citizen). He continued to practise law until 1856 when he was hired to be the first paleontologist for the Geological Survey of Canada. He moved to its headquarters in Montreal. He found his real vocation in geology and paleontology and spent the rest of his life studying and describing the fossils preserved in the museum of the Survey. In his lifetime, he identified 1065 new species and 61 new genera, including Aspidella, the first documented fossil of the Ediacaran biota. He was also a member of the Natural History Society of Montreal, the Geological Society of London, and had been awarded medals by the International Exhibition of London in 1862 and by the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867.

In 1845, he married Helen Walker Wilson. He died on June 14, 1876, in Montreal, Quebec.