James Swan was a lawyer who specialized in admiralty law. He immigrated to Washington Territory from Boston, Mass. in 1852 and developed an interest in Northwest Coast Indian culture that is reflected in many aspects of the records. Throughout his life at Neah Bay and Port Townsend he served as Notary Public and Judge, Pilot Commissioner, Hawaiian Consul, Collector of Customs, and Collector for the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries

Engineer W.G. Swan played a significant role in the design and construction of bridges, railways and harbour works for more than six decades in British Columbia. He was born in Kincardine, Ontario and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1906. He joined Canadian National Railways as an engineer and came to British Columbia. After serving overseas during World War I, Swan returned to B.C. and established his own consulting firm. His firm was retained to work on the Pattullo Bridge (1938) and the Lion's Gate Bridge (1939). In 1945 Swan entered into partnership with H.A. Rhodes and Hiram Wooster.

Carol Swayze received a law degree from the University of Victoria prior to writing a biography of Tom Berger.

The Swedish Cultural Society was founded in 1952.

The HMS Swiftsure was an iron armoured battleship of 6910 tons built by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company at Jarrow in 1870. She was engaged against the Spanish Intransigentes in 1873 and with Hornby at the Dardanelles in 1878. She became a Pacific Station flagship from 1882-1885, and again from 1888 to 1890. She was the largest of the ships in the Pacific Squadron, which also included the HMS Sappho and HMS Mutine, both sloops. She was commanded by Captain R.C. Atchinson, and was a part of expeditions commanded by Admiral Algernon McLellan Lyons. From 1901 to 1908, she served as a stores hulk under the name Orontes. She was sold for scrap in 1908.

Hilda Symonds (1913-2003) was a community planner, educator and leader on planning issues in British Columbia. Over the course of her career she played a significant role in planning efforts in both Vancouver and across the province by serving as the first Executive Coordinator of the Vancouver City Planning Commission in addition to Director of Urban Affairs Programs at Continuing Education UBC.
Symonds was born in 1913 in Liverpool, England and received a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1934. After working in a variety of fields including industrial welfare and personal management, she began her career as a teacher after arriving in Canada in 1948, and from 1959-1966 taught at the Crofton House School in Vancouver. In her next role as Director Urban Affairs Programs, Continuing Education at UBC (1966-1970), Symonds worked to offer adult education programs on urbanization and planning relating to area rehabilitation, housing, transportation and other issues. While in this role, Symonds edited the book The Teacher and the City and advocated for city planning curricula in local school systems.
Beginning in 1972, Symonds became the first-ever Executive Coordinator of the Vancouver City Planning Commission after being an elected member of the commission since 1964. As Executive Coordinator, Symonds championed public input in the urban planning process and was key in the development of the Goals for Vancouver document which had a long-term impact on the city’s planning decisions. Symonds would retire from this role in 1983 at the age of 70 but served on or chaired numerous civic committees in Vancouver and Victoria including the Heritage Advisory Committee, Downtown Advisory Committee, the Citizen Advisory Committee for the development of BC Place, the Provincial Capital Commission and more. In addition to working in Vancouver and British Columbia, Symonds was a member of various delegations to international or national conferences on metropolitan or city planning topics. This included being the Vancouver delegate to the National Capital Commission conference in 1988 as well as being part of the Canadian delegation to a meeting on metropolitan problems in Athens, Greece in 1975.
Symonds’ authored or edited works include: The Teacher and the City, Improving Human Settlements, Canada --An Urban Agenda and Meech Lake, From Centre to Periphery: the impact of the 1987 constitutional accord on Canadian settlements: speculation. Symonds also received numerous awards throughout her life which include but are not limited to: the Canada Centennial Medal (1967), Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal (1977), and the City of Vancouver Civic Merit Medal (1983). In 1984, she was made an Honorary Member of the Planning Institute of BC and in 2019 she was included amongst 18 women in Plan Canada’s centenary issue.
Symonds died in 2003 at age 90.

Chiyoko Szlavnics was born in 1967 in Toronto and is a composer and visual artist currently residing in Berlin. Her parents, maternal grandfather, and experiences from her childhood have greatly influenced her musical and graphical works. Born to two artists, her mother, Aiko Suzuki, worked with painting, textiles, sculpture, and designing dance sets, and was of Japanese descent; her father was a highly analytical artist, something Szlavnics says she inherited, and was of half-Serbian and half-Hungarian descent. Her maternal grandfather was an avid nature lover, and when Szlavnic would visit him they would often spend time at the beaches on the north shore of Vancouver where they would explore the life cycle of salmon. This time on the beach would influence her interest in beating sounds within her compositions, as she often reflected on how the light bounced and reflected on water.

Her musical endeavors started at the University of Toronto where she originally studied flute and saxophone in the Faculty of Music where she graduated in 1989. Post-graduation, she worked under the direction of Nic Gotham at Hemispheres, an improvising ensemble based in Toronto. In 1993, she was asked to compose a piece for Hemispheres, and that is when she used her line drawings for the first time to organize and create the sound. In 1994, she took private composition lessons from James Tenney, and during this time she began to start her own composing. She moved to Berlin in 1997 after winning a scholarship to attend the Akademie Schloss Solitude. There she began collaborating with various other musicians and developing her unique, experimental compositional approach to music. In her compositions she explores: states of harmonicity, beating and rippling sounds, exceptionally slow glissandi (gliding between pitches), intonation, and combing musical instruments with sinewaves. Her compositions are composed for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, percussion, among others and can be found throughout her 30+ works. Szlavnics says her main goal when composing is to take risks and be surprised by her music.

As a visual artist, she predominately creates line drawings using a fine line pen. Drawing is an integral part of her compositional process, as a way to map her preliminary ideas for the music. The lines represent how the tones are extending though time, or could also represent specific instrumental intervals. These lines are an abstract way for her to represent her imagined sound world since she is not inclined towards the traditional graphic score. Similar to her musical compositions, the unexpected is central to Szlavnics’ drawings. The drawings consists of lines, dots, and how they connect; there are some drawings that are in a in a moiré fashion as well. Later in her drawing career, she focused more on the visual arts aspect of the drawings instead of drawing for musical composition.