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804 recordsStructured records (JSON) ↗
Joseph Casavant, portrait restored from a 1914 publication.
CA-K458Economy & trade

Joseph Casavant, organ builder of Saint-Hyacinthe

Joseph Casavant left blacksmithing at 27 to study music and became a builder of musical instruments, producing his first church organ in his Saint-Hyacinthe shop in 1840. By his retirement in 1866 Casavant organs were in demand throughout eastern Canada, and under his sons Claver and Samuel, Casavant Frères won an international reputation.

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Photo: Ty's Commons · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Dr. Healey Willan in 1930 (Archives of Ontario).
CA-K457Culture & sport

Healey Willan, composer of sacred music

Healey Willan came to Canada in 1913 to teach at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, now the Royal Conservatory. As organist and choirmaster of St. Mary Magdalene in Toronto from 1921 to 1968, he composed the sacred music for which he is particularly remembered.

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Photo: Unknown photographer (1930); Archives of Ontario, I0001735 · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Helena Gutteridge in 1911 (City of Vancouver Archives).
CA-K456Institutions

Helena Gutteridge, suffragist and labour organizer

Helena Gutteridge, a feminist reformer who had campaigned for the vote in Britain, came to Vancouver in 1911 and brought wage-earning women into Canada’s mostly middle-class suffrage movement. She helped organize women workers through the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, and in 1937 became the first woman elected to Vancouver City Council, helping lay the foundations of social housing in British Columbia.

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Photo: Matthews, James Skitt, Major · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Mary Southcott, portrait published in The Distaff, 1917.
CA-K455Institutions

Mary Southcott and nursing in Newfoundland

Mary Southcott, an educator, suffragist and nursing leader, led the campaign to professionalize nursing in early 20th-century Newfoundland. Trained in London, she founded the St. John’s General Hospital School of Nursing in 1903, the only one in Newfoundland until 1929, and helped raise standards, train midwives and found a professional association of nurses.

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Photo: The Distaff, 1917 · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Agnes Maule Machar, portrait published in 1903.
CA-K452Culture & sport

Agnes Maule Machar, Victorian social commentator

Agnes Maule Machar was an influential social commentator in Victorian Canada and a proponent of Christian social reform and Canadian nationalism with imperial sentiment. In leading periodicals she debated intellectual leaders, arguing for temperance, labour reform and women’s rights, including access to higher education.

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Photo: Unknown photographer; published in H. J. Morgan, Types of Canadian Women (1903) · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Margaret Marshall Saunders (Gauvin & Gentzel).
CA-K451Culture & sport

Margaret Marshall Saunders and Beautiful Joe

Margaret Marshall Saunders of Milton, Nova Scotia, wrote some 25 books, 14 of them animal stories. Her first, Beautiful Joe (1894), the gentle autobiography of a dog, sold about a million copies in 14 languages, and she gave most of her royalties to humane societies.

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Photo: Gauvin & Gentzel · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Portrait of Grace Annie Lockhart.
CA-K450Institutions

Grace Annie Lockhart, first woman graduate in the British Empire

Grace Annie Lockhart was the first woman to earn a university degree in the British Empire. A student at the Mount Allison Ladies’ Academy in Sackville, New Brunswick, she took courses at Mount Allison College, which had become co-educational in 1872, enrolled formally in 1874 and graduated on 25 May 1875 with a Bachelor of Science and English Literature.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Mary Agnes Snively, portrait published in 1901.
CA-K449Institutions

Mary Agnes Snively and the nursing profession

Mary Agnes Snively led the struggle to have nursing recognized as a science-based profession rather than a domestic pursuit. In 1908 she founded the Canadian National Association of Trained Nurses, which became the Canadian Nurses Association in 1924, and she made the Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing a model of nursing education.

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Photo: The American Journal of Nursing · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Charles Edenshaw, Haida artist (Canadian Museum of History).
CA-K445Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Charles Edenshaw (Tahayren), Haida artist

Charles Edenshaw (Tahayren), born at Skidegate, was the foremost Haida carver at the time Haida art first won international recognition. Trained by his uncle, he worked in argillite and silver in a personal style that extended the traditional range of Haida art, and his work is held in museums in North America and Europe.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Ipirvik (Ebierbing) and Taqulittuq (Tookoolito), tintype from before 1876 (Mystic Seaport Museum).
CA-K444Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Ipirvik and Taqulittuq, Inuit guides of Arctic expeditions

Ipirvik and Taqulittuq, an Inuit couple from Baffin Island, helped several important Arctic expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s: Ipirvik hunted and drove dog teams, and Taqulittuq made Arctic clothing and interpreted. In 1872–1873 they were indispensable to the survival of a group of American explorers stranded all winter on an ice floe, showing the value of the Inuit way of travelling light and living off the land.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Stephen Leacock, portrait published in 1913.
CA-K440Culture & sport

Stephen Leacock, humorist

Stephen Leacock spent most of his career at McGill University teaching history and political science, but he is chiefly known as a humorist. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) made his reputation across the English-speaking world, and his work finds humour in ordinary people in everyday situations through exaggeration and incongruity.

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Photo: The Arts & Letters Club of Toronto · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Portrait of Timothy Eaton, 1903.
CA-K439Economy & trade

Timothy Eaton, department store and mail order

Timothy Eaton, born in Ireland, opened his own store in Toronto in 1869. Innovations such as cash sales at fixed prices made it one of Canada’s first department stores, and in 1884 he introduced a mail-order department that brought low prices and a wide choice of goods to rural Canadians. At his death it was Canada’s largest retail business.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Sir Sandford Fleming with his grandchildren, July 1893 (Topley Studio).
CA-K436History

Sir Sandford Fleming, engineer and champion of standard time

Sir Sandford Fleming, born in Scotland, came to Canada in 1845 and became survey and construction engineer for the Intercolonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific. A man of wide interests and an ardent imperialist, he advocated the Pacific telegraph cable, designed the first Canadian postage stamp in 1851, and was an early champion of standard time.

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Photo: William James Topley · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Joseph-Armand Bombardier at the wheel of a Bombardier military snowmobile, March 1943.
CA-K435Economy & trade

Joseph-Armand Bombardier and the snowmobile

Joseph-Armand Bombardier of Valcourt, Quebec, developed snow vehicles that helped reduce winter isolation in rural areas of Canada and elsewhere. He patented the snowmobile in 1937 and the smaller Ski-Doo in 1960, both designed and built in Valcourt, and after his death the company he founded became a world leader in transportation.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Thomas “Carbide” Willson in Ottawa, around 1914 (Library and Archives Canada).
CA-K432Economy & trade

Thomas “Carbide” Willson and acetylene

Thomas “Carbide” Willson, a largely self-educated inventor from Oxford County, Upper Canada, discovered in 1892 a method of mass-producing calcium carbide. Acetylene gas made from it was used for lighting and as a source of other industrial chemicals, and his discovery helped lay the foundation of the electrochemical industry in the early 20th century.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Lionel Conacher as a football player in Toronto, 1933.
CA-K430Culture & sport

Lionel Conacher, the “Big Train”

Lionel “Big Train” Conacher excelled at six professional sports and was voted Canada’s all-round male athlete of the half-century in 1950. A star of football and lacrosse who helped win the 1921 Grey Cup, he played in the National Hockey League from 1925 to 1937 on two Stanley Cup-winning teams, then was elected to the Ontario legislature and, in 1949, to the House of Commons.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Howie Morenz of the Montréal Canadiens, around 1936.
CA-K429Culture & sport

Howie Morenz, the “Stratford Streak”

Howie Morenz of Mitchell, Ontario, joined the Montréal Canadiens in 1923 and helped them win three Stanley Cups, twice leading the league in scoring and winning the Hart Trophy three times. Probably the most exciting player of his day, he died in Montréal of complications from a hockey injury and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1945.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Ned Hanlan, world rowing champion, around 1878 (Notman & Sandham).
CA-K427Culture & sport

Ned Hanlan, world rowing champion

Ned Hanlan of Toronto was a champion rower in an era when rowing was a hugely popular spectator sport. He won the world sculling title in 1880 and held it until 1884, and by his retirement in 1897 had lost only about six of some 350 races. Known as “The Boy in Blue”, he was one of Canada’s first national sporting heroes.

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Photo: Notman & Sandham · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Ernest Rutherford at McGill University, 1905.
CA-K426History

Ernest Rutherford’s radioactivity research at McGill

As Macdonald Professor of Physics at McGill University from 1898 to 1907, Ernest Rutherford, working with Frederick Soddy, made fundamental discoveries about radioactivity that made McGill an important centre of atomic physics research. He later led laboratories at Manchester and Cambridge and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

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Photo: Unknown, published in 1939 in Rutherford : being the life and letters of the Rt. Hon. Lord Rutherford, O. M · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Alice Wilson at her desk with a microscope, Geological Survey of Canada, before 1946.
CA-K424History

Alice Wilson, the first woman geologist at the Geological Survey

Alice Wilson, a paleontologist and geologist who studied the Ottawa–St. Lawrence Lowlands, was the first woman employed as a geologist at the Geological Survey of Canada. She earned a doctorate in 1929 with support from the Canadian Federation of University Women, became the first female Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and helped open science and the federal public service to women.

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Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
A statue of Shanawdithit at Boyd’s Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador, photographed in 2013.
CA-K423Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Shanawdithit and Beothuk knowledge

Shanawdithit was one of the last documented Beothuk of Newfoundland. Seized by English settlers in 1823, she never regained her freedom, but she taught her captors much of what is known about the decline of her people; with the help of her sketches she described encounters between the British and the Beothuk, including the capture of her aunt Demasduit. She died in St. John’s in 1829.

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Photo: Kaye Duncan (Flickr: Oh Kaye) · Photo licence: CC0 · Credit & context
Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, photographed by C. M. Bell around 1902.
CA-K420History

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, Black leader on Vancouver Island

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs helped lead about 800 Black residents from San Francisco to Vancouver Island in 1858 and became the recognized leader of their community. Elected to Victoria City Council, he was the first Black person to hold elected office in British Columbia; an entrepreneur in mining and trade, he advocated for Black settlers’ rights before returning to the United States in 1870.

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Photo: Charles Milton Bell · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Alphonse Desjardins in Montréal, April 1882 (Notman & Sandham).
CA-K417Economy & trade

Alphonse Desjardins and the caisses populaires

Alphonse Desjardins of Lévis, a journalist and parliamentary stenographer, founded the caisse populaire movement in Quebec. Concerned about ordinary people’s finances and the lack of French-Canadian banks, he devised co-operative savings and loan societies organized by parish, founded the first in Lévis in 1900, and spent the last 20 years of his life spreading the movement.

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Photo: Notman & Sandham · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Idola Saint-Jean, portrait published in Le Monde illustré in 1901.
CA-K415Institutions

Idola Saint-Jean and women’s suffrage in Quebec

Between the world wars, Idola Saint-Jean was a dominant figure in the fight for women’s right to vote and for reform of the Civil Code in Quebec. Despite strong opposition from the government, the clergy and many suffragists, she practised a “shock feminism” demanding equal rights for women, and as an educator and journalist she also championed social justice and women workers.

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Photo: A.J. Rice, Laprés & Lavergne · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context