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George C. Laurence was born in 1905 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He received his BSc (1925) and MSc (1927) in physics from Dalhousie University and earned a PhD at Cambridge University. In 1930 he joined the National Research Council in Ottawa, where he worked on radiation dosages in cancer treatments and promoting safety from radiation exposure. From 1946 Laurence was the scientific advisor to the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. He was appointed chairman of the Reactor Safety Advisory Committee at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in 1956 and from 1961-1970 he served as president of the Atomic Energy Canada Board.

Laurence received several awards for his work, including the MBE, the Canadian Association of Physicists medal, the W.B. Lewis medal from the Canadian Nuclear Association, and a number of honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Laws from Dalhousie in 1967. George Laurence married Elfreda Blois in 1931, with whom he had two daughters. He lived in Chalk River, Ontario, from 1946 until his death in 1987.

George Lawson was born 12 October 1827 at Newport, Scotland, to Alexander Lawson and Margaret McEwan. He was married first to Lucy Stapley (d. 1871) of Edinburgh, with whom he had two daughters. In 1876, five years after Stapley's death, he married Caroline Matilda Knox, née Jordan, in Halifax.

Lawson was initially apprenticed to a solicitor, but was moved to study the natural and physical sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He received his DPhil from the University of Giessen and moved to Canada in 1858 to take up an appointment as professor of chemistry and natural history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. During his time at Queen's he founded the Botanical Society of Canada (1860).

In 1863 Lawson left Queen's to join the newly reorganized Dalhousie College as professor of chemistry and mineralogy, where he introduced laboratory work and field trips into his classes. He lectured at the Halifax Medical College, helped to organize the Technological Institute of Halifax (1877), and was an avid supporter of the Nova Scotian Institute of Natural Science (later the Nova Scotian Institute of Science). He was a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada, serving as its president in 1887–1888, and was involved in overseas organizations such as London's Royal Horticultural Society. Lawson died of a stroke in 1895.

Alexander H. Leighton was a sociologist and psychologist and the lead researcher of the seminal Stirling County Study in psychiatric epidemiology, the longest running study of its kind to understand the prevalence and types of mental illness across generations in a cross-cultural community. Born on 17 July 1908 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he received a BA from Princeton University (1932), an MSc from Cambridge University (1934), and an MD from Johns Hopkins Medical School (1936). He held professorial appointments in both the departments of psychiatry and community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie University, as well as in sociology and anthropology at Cornell, and he was professor emeritus at Harvard. He also served on multiple advisory committees for the governments of Canada and the United States and for the World Health Organization, and over his lifetime received a multitude of awards and honours. He died in 2007.

In 1948 Leighton initiated the first of the post-war studies of the distribution and prevalence of mental illness in a general population. The Stirling County Study is still active and from Leighton's retirement from Harvard University in 1975, it was directed by his wife and research partner, Dr. Jane Murphy Leighton. One of its initial findings in Nova Scotia, was that one in five adults experiences mental illness, most commonly depression, anxiety and/or alcohol abuse. Similar studies were carried out in other settings, including New York City, Alaska, Nigeria and Vietnam. Other investigations of this type now number in the hundreds and have been conducted across the world.

Archibald Ogilvie Leighton was born in 1880 in Ballycarry, Northern Ireland, the youngest son of John Leighton (1841-1928), a Scottish-born attorney who settled in Ireland after his marriage to Caroline Wilson (1849-1885). Archie—or “A.O.”—was the sixth of eight children and the youngest of three sons. As a young man, Archie was apprenticed in the building trade and in 1902 was sent to Sligo, on Ireland’s west coast, to supervise the building of a post office. It was here that he met and became engaged to Gertrude Ann Hamilton. In 1906 he moved to the United States in pursuit of work, intending to take advantage of the construction boom in San Francisco that followed the great earthquake. However, he ended up in Philadelphia; after Gertrude arrived the same year in New York and they were married, they settled just north of Philadelphia, where their first child, Alexander (Alec), was born.

In 1909 Archie joined forces with a wealthy businessman named A.D. Leighton to form the contracting firm Irwin and Leighton Company. As the company grew more prosperous and a daughter, Gertrude (“Gussie”), was born, the Leightons moved further out of the city and began to spend their summers on the New Jersey coast. However, the combined threat of killer sharks and a polio outbreak in 1916 prompted them to start summering in Nova Scotia, where Archie—(and later, Alec) eventually established second homes in Digby County.

In 1955 Irwin and Leighton was sold to its employees and in 1958 Archie’s wife, Gertrude, died. Some years later Archie married Rose Witowski. He continued to work for the firm and was serving as Chairman of the Board when he died in 1964.

Dorothea Cross Leighton was a medical anthropologist known in particular for her research focused on the psychiatric health of Indigenous peoples in America, including the Navajo in New Mexico and the Inuit of Alaska. She was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, on 2 September 1908, the second daughter of Dorothea Farquhar and Frederick Cushing Cross. Her siblings were Rosamond (b. 1907), Mary Farquhar (b.1910) and Frederick C, Jr. (1917-1943).

Dorothea received her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1930 and an MD from Johns Hopkins in 1936. She was married to Alexander H. Leighton from 1937-1965, with whom she had two children, Dorothea G. and Frederick A. They divorced in 1965.

From 1930-1932 Dorothea Leighton was a chemistry technician at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and from 1936-1937 she was a medicine intern at Baltimore City Hospitals. She remained there as house psychiatrist from 1937-1939 and, with Dr. Alexander H. Leighton, received the Joint Post-doctoral Research Training Fellowship at the Social Science Resource Council in 1939-1940. From 1941-1945 she was a Special Research Physician for the United States Indian Service, after which she was appointed Social Science Analyst for the United States Office of War Information. Her academic appointments included: Professor of Child Development and Family Relations at New York State School of Home Economics, Cornell University (1949-1952); Senior Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology (1952-1965); assistant, then associate professor at the Psychiatric Medical College (1954 -1965); Professor of Mental Health at the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1965-1974), and department chair (1972-1974). Dr. Leighton was Professor Emeritus of Mental Health at Chapel Hill and at the Department of Epidemiology and Internal Health, University of California, San Francisco, from 1974 until her death in 1992.

Dorothea Leighton wrote two books: Character of Danger: Psychiatric Symptoms in Selected Communities (1963) and People of the Middle Place: A Study of the Zuni Indians (1966). With Alexander Leighton she co-wrote The Navajo Door: An Introduction to Navajo Life (1944); Gregorio The Handtrembler (1949); and Psychiatric Disorder Among the Yoruba (1963). In addition, she wrote two books with Clyde Kluckhohn.

Gertrude (“Gussie”) Leighton was a professor of political science with a specialty in international law and psychiatry. She was born in 1914 in Belfast, Ireland, the daughter of Archibald and Gertrude Leighton. Her mother and brother, Alexander, were visiting family in Ireland when the First World War broke out; due to her pregnancy they were refused passage back to the United States. It was March 1915 before they returned to their home in Narbeth, Pennsylvania, on the Philadelphia Main Line.

Gertrude received her early education at the Phebe Anna Thorne School for Girls, an open air model school within Bryn Mawr College. She returned to Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate, earning a degree in Classical Archeology in 1938. In 1940 she was hired as a lecturer in the English Department at Barnard College, but left in 1942 to enter law school at Yale. She received her JD in 1945. Between 1944 and 1947 she practised law with Carter, Ledyard & Milburn in New York City, then returned to Yale as a lecturer in law, including world law. In 1950 she again returned to Bryn Mawr, where she was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, retiring from her alma mater in 1986 as professor emeritus. From 1959-1961 she lectured in law at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also appointed as a visiting associate research professor in law and psychiatry from 1961-1965.

Like her parents and brother, Alexander, Gertrude maintained close ties with her Irish relatives. She made extended visits to Ireland in 1920-21 and 1932-34, and during many summers, about which she writes in an unpublished biography. She lived with her longtime partner, Catherine M. Fales, until her death in 1996.

Gertrude Ann Hamilton was born in 1883 in the small village of Balincar on the west coast of Ireland, one of six children born to William Hamilton and Gertrude Hamilton Kerr: Wilhemina, George, Henry, Gertrude Ann, Angus and Ethel Jean.

She was raised in a close-knit family across from the village mill, which her father ran. As a young woman she worked as a clerk in the nearby town of Sligo, which is where she met her future husband, Archibald Leighton, who was there supervising the building of a new post office. After several years of courting and corresponding, they were engaged to be married. In 1906 Archie moved to the United States to pursue his building career and, shortly after, Gertrude made the journey alone to New York, where they were married before settling in Philadelphia.

In 1908, soon after her son, Alexander, was born, Gertrude contracted typhoid fever. After regaining her health, she took Alec home to Ireland for an extended visit. They returned again in 1914, and Gertrude (“Gussie”) was born. The outbreak of World War One kept them in Ireland until the spring of 1915. Five years later they made another visit, this time staying for a year for the sake of economy. From 1931-1934 she again lived apart from Archie in order to accompany their children to England, where Alec went to Cambridge University and Gussie attended boarding school. These extended family separations were marked by abundant letters back and forth across the Atlantic, as was her move from Ireland to the United States.

Gertrude Leighton died in 1958.