A native of Dundas, Ontario, Joseph Spencer graduated from McGill in Applied Science in 1874. After postgraduate studies in geology and mineralogy at Gottenberg University (M.A., Ph.D. 1877) and King's College, Halifax (M.A. 1880), Spencer taught at Hamilton Collegiate Institute (1877-1879) and King's College (1880-1882). From 1882 to 1887, he was Professor of geology and mineralogy as well as director of the Museum of Geology and Natural History at the University of Missouri. In 1888 he moved to the University of Georgia, and from 1890 to 1893 combined teaching duties with those of State Geologist. The later part of his career was devoted to independent research.

David Jerome Spence was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1873. He studied architecture at M.I.T and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He moved to Montreal around 1900 and became a member of l'Association des Architectes de la Province du Québec in 1901. He established architectural firms with Samuel Arnold Finley from 1901-1912, and F. David Mathias from 1937-1952. Between 1940 and 1945, while Mathias was called to war, the firm practised under the name of Spence, Mathias and Burge. He operated an architectural firm under his own name from 1913-1937.

Frank Gouldsmith Speck, an anthropologist and ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania, specialized in the study of Algonquian and Iroquois peoples in both the Eastern woodlands of the U.S. and the boreal areas of Eastern Canada. His interest in these peoples had been sparked on a camping trip around 1900 when he became friends with young members of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut. A graduate of Columbia University, having earned a BA and MA by 1905, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Yuchi people of Oklahoma among whom he had worked in 1904, 1905 and 1908, under noted anthropologist Franz Boas for a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1908. The University then hired him in a dual capacity as an assistant in ethnology at the university’s museum and instructor in anthropology. In 1912 he was appointed a full-time faculty member in the newly created Department of Anthropology; in 1913 he became chairman of the department, a role he filled until 1949.