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Robert Bell was a Canadian geologist, professor and civil servant, and is considered one of Canada’s greatest exploring scientists, having named over 3000 geographical features. He was born in Toronto in 1841 to Presbyterian clergyman and amateur geologist, Reverend Andrew Bell, and Elizabeth Notman. In 1873 he married Agnes Smith, with whom he had four children.

As a teenager Bell worked as a summer assistant to Sir William Edmond Logan with the Geological Survey of Canada; by 1859 he was heading his own survey party. He was educated at McGill University, where he studied under John William Dawson. In 1861 he earned a civil engineering degree and the Governor General’s Medal. He studied for a further two years at the University of Edinburgh. In 1863 he was appointed professor of chemistry and natural sciences at Queen’s College, Kingston, but continued summer fieldwork for the Geographical Survey. In 1867 he joined the Survey full-time, where he remained until his retirement in 1908. He died in 1917.

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.

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.

Anne Charlotte Bishop is an activist, author, educator, food security advocate, labour organizer and community development worker. Since the 1980s she has advocated for LGBTQ rights, union organization, equity and anti-racist policies in the province of Nova Scotia.

In the 1970s she attended the University of Toronto's Centre for Christian Studies, where she was introduced to social analysis and collective approaches to education. In 1979 she worked on the People's Food Commission, a participatory research project that held hearings across Canada on issues of food security. In the 1980s she helped to organize a union of predominantly female workers at a Pictou County fish plant. In the summer of 1987, she joined Dalhousie University's Henson College as the coordinator of the Community Development and Outreach Unit. From 1987-1992 Bishop played a central role in Lesbian and Gay Rights Nova Scotia (LGRNS), which successfully lobbied the provincial government for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act. As an adult educator, she helped to develop a course on grassroots leadership development and wrote two influential books on consciousness-raising, anti-oppression organizational change and allyship. With Brenda Beagan, she founded a women's chorus, The Secret Furies. Bishop is currently an organic farmer in rural Nova Scotia with her partner Jan.