Howard Jefferson Lewis, also known as H. Jefferson Lewis, and commonly Jefferson Lewis, was born in Montreal in 1951. He was the son of Crosby Lewis and Ruth Mary Penfield Lewis, the daughter of renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Graves Penfield. Lewis was educated in Europe and the United States, and graduated with a degree in Film Studies from Queen's University in 1972. He worked as a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen, Southam News Service, and CBC Radio. Following the death of his grandfather in 1976, Lewis undertook writing a biography of Penfield, which resulted in Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield (Toronto: Doubleday) published in 1981. The biography was later turned into a screenplay and a movie produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board of Canada. In subsequent years, he worked as a producer and wrote and directed short dramas, whose themes frequently revolved around Canadian subjects. Lewis married Catherine Ann Keachie in 1976. The couple had one daughter, Cleo Lewis.

Henry Carvill Lewis was born on November 16, 1853, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He was an American geologist and mineralogist. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1876) and became affiliated with the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania in 1879. For the next three years, he served as a volunteer member and became interested in the study of glacial phenomena. In 1880, he was appointed Professor of Mineralogy at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and in 1883, he became the Chair of Geology in Haverford College, Pennsylvania. He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1881. During the winters from 1885 to 1887, he studied petrology under Prof. H.F. Rosenbusch in Heidelberg, Germany, and during the summers he investigated the glacial geology of northern Europe and the British Isles. His observations in North America had demonstrated the former extension of land-ice, and the existence of great terminal moraines and were published in his "Report on the Terminal Moraine in Pennsylvania and Western New York" (1884). The results of his observations in Britain were published posthumously in 1894 entitled "Papers and Notes on the Glacial Geology of Great Britain and Ireland."

In 1882, he married Julia Catharine Foulke (1856–1924). He died on July 21, 1888, in Manchester, England.