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Jarvis Benoit was an Acadian fiddler from Richmond County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Jarvis began his professional career in Cape Breton where he performed in concerts and at dances during the 1940s and 1950s. He was recognized for his large repertoire and his ability to blend Acadian and Irish fiddling styles.

Jarvis was married to Marie Claire Benoit and had a son Louis and daughter Nancy. He moved to Halifax with his family in 1957 and opened a small contracting business. Jarvis recorded two albums and performed on the radio and television. He regularly played concerts and festivals throughout his career and performed in a series of concerts with symphony orchestras across Canada.

The Bigelow family was involved in shipbuilding in the Kings County region of Nova Scotia for five generations. Amasa Bigelow (1755-1799) arrived in Cornwallis c. 1762 with his New England Planter father and became a ship’s carpenter, later operating a sawmill on Deep Hollows Mountain. He married Roxana Cone in 1775. The eldest of their eleven children, Ebenezer (1776-1860), established a shipyard at Oak Point, Kingsport, where he designed, built and sailed a variety of small vessels. He was married in 1804 to Nancy Rand, with whom he had six children.

Ebenezer Jr. (1815-1899) followed in his father’s footsteps and in 1838 established his own shipyard in Canning, Nova Scotia. Over the next fifty years he was the master builder on 67 ships, from 12-tonne sloops to the 1164-tonne Arbela, designed by his son Gideon.

Ebenezer, Jr. married Waity Sanford in 1834 and had 10 children, three of whom (John, Gideon and Samuel) joined him in the Bigelow Shipyard, eventually taking it over after his death in 1889. They in turn were joined by Ebenezer, Jr.’s grandsons, Scott and Halle, whose vessels included 4 tern schooners and one steamship, the Brunswick (1909). The last ship built in the Bigelow Shipyard was the Cape Blomidon, which was launched in 1919.

John Robert Bigelow, the son of Halle Bigelow and Hannah Ann (Blenkhorn) Bigelow, was born 16 September 1906 in New Salem, Nova Scotia. He was raised and educated in Canning, Nova Scotia, with his four sisters, Anna, Laurabel, Mabel and Lydia. He studied engineering at Acadia University for two years before transferring to the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, from where he graduated in 1933 with a Bachelor of Science in Forestry.

He began his career marketing forestry products for the government of Nova Scotia. During World War II he moved to Ottawa to work on federal lumber export policies and controls. IN 1946 he returned to Nova Scotia and became the manager of the Maritime Lumber Bureau, later taking employment as a provincial civil servant and ending his career as Deputy Minister for the Department of Trade & Industry.

John Bigelow married Muriel Olga Smith in 1938, with whom he had two children, John Robert, Jr. (1942-1994) and Mary Emery (1946-). He died in 1997.

Marian Binkley is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 1999-2010.

She received her BA (1973), MA (1975), and PhD in Anthropology (1981) from the University of Toronto.

Binkley conducted extensive research in maritime communities. Her first two books, Voices from offshore (1994) and Risks, dangers and rewards in the Nova Scotia offshore fishery (1995), focus on working conditions in the Nova Scotia deep sea fishing fleet. Set adrift: Fishing families (2002), compares the households of coastal and deep sea fishermen and how they adapted to the pressures of the Atlantic fisheries crisis. Changing tides: Gender, globalization and world fisheries (2005), co-edited with Barbara Neis, Sirj Gerard and Christina Manezy, explores the relationship between globalization and gender against the backdrop of the world fisheries crisis. Later research explores sustainable livelihoods in Atlantic Canadian coastal communities, with a particular focus on the impact of the Atlantic fisheries crisis. Her interest in fishermen's health and safety stems from an early research study in Fogo Island, where she noticed the fishermen appeared older than their chronological age.

Binkley was involved in CIDA-supported development projects in the West Indies, Indonesia and the Philippines, focusing on resource management and other environmental concerns, and also in the Cache Creek, British Columbia, burial site analysis.

William R. Bird was born in East Mapleton, N.S. on May 11, 1891. Born into poverty, he moved to the Canadian Prairies to help harvest crops as a teenager. In 1914, he enlisted in the Canadian Army and served in the trenches with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces (42nd Battalion, Black Watch of Canada) in France and Belgium until 1918. Upon demobilization in 1919, he returned to Cumberland County, N.S, where he married Ethel Sutton with whom he had two children, Stephen and Betty. After a failed general store venture in Southampton, he moved to Amherst with his family and worked at the Post Office. Winning a story-writing contest in the early 1920s and a love of writing prompted him by 1928 to try making his living by writing. Bird's stories were widely accepted by magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Maritime Advocate, Toronto Star Weekly, Family Herald and Weekly Star and his first monograph, A Century at Chignecto, was published in 1928. During the 1930s, Bird lectured widely across Canada, and in 1933 he joined the staff of the recently established Nova Scotia Tourist Bureau. For the next thirty-three years, he worked in various capacities for the Nova Scotia government. In 1938, he and his family moved to Halifax where he served as Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Advisory Council until his retirement in 1966. Bird died on January 28, 1984.

In 1949 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Mount Allison University. He published roughly 25 books and 600 short stories, for which he garnered acclaim for his historical fiction and war stories. Although Bird wrote on many subjects, he was continually fascinated by the early settlers of Nova Scotia and wrote many stories and novels on the topic. His experience during the First World War also became inspiration for much of his work. He twice won the Ryerson All Canada Award for Fiction and served as president of the Canadian Author's Association.