Fonds SCA430-GA501 - Local manuscripts collection.

Susanne von Harpe (nee Baroness von Stackelberg) was born in what is now Tartu, Estonia in 1914. After school she worked in farming and housekeeping and In 1935 she married Ulrich von Harpe. In 1940 the family fled to Germany after Russian troops had occupied Estonia, settling in Schroda. On January 20, 1945 Susanne, Ulrich and their children fled West ultimately to Dotzum. On December 7, 1951 the family sailed to Canada arriving on December 23, and taking the train to their farm in Linwood, Ontario. Susanne spent many years traveling with her husband who was a sailor, and enjoyed painting and writing. Susanne died July 29th, 2008.

Hildegard Marsden (nee von Boetticher) was a the Dean of Women and a lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages University of Waterloo. Marsden was born in Germany in 1920 and moved to the United States with her family. In 1941 while attending Randolph College in Virginia her family was deported back to Germany where she worked in a censoring office in Berlin. After the war Marsden worked a liaison between the German government and the Americans and British and during this time she met her future husband British officer Horace Marsden. The couple immigrated to Canada in 1951 and settled in Waterloo Region with their three children. Marsden began taking classes at Waterloo College and was the first woman in the region to return to university as a mature student with children. In 1959 she graduated with her BA from Randolph College and went to on to obtain an MA from the University of Waterloo. She was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages in 1965 and in 1967 she was appointed Dean of Women. Marsden died April 24, 1988 with interment at Mount Hope Cemetery.

Anne Innis Dagg is a former a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, in Independent Studies. She is a scholar and writer in several areas of interest, from zoology to women's studies. The daughter of Mary Quayle Innis and Harold Adams Innis, Anne was born on January 25, 1933, in Toronto, Ontario.

She became interested in giraffes as a child, and went on to take a BA from the University of Toronto in Honours Biology in 1955 (as gold medalist), and an MA from the University of Toronto in genetics in 1956, where she was also a demonstrator for botany and genetics from 1954-1956. She then traveled alone to South Africa to study the giraffe in 1956-1957.

In 1957 she married Ian Dagg, a physicist. They moved to Waterloo, Ontario, in 1959, where Ian became a professor at the new University of Waterloo.

Anne worked as a part-time lecturer at Waterloo Lutheran University in anatomy and physiology from 1962-1965, and then as an anatomy demonstrator at the University of Waterloo in 1966. In 1967 she earned her PhD, which examined gaits and their development in Infraorder Pecora, from the University of Waterloo. She was also a sessional assistant professor at the University of Guelph, Department of Zoology that year.

Anne Innis Dagg did research at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, in 1967-1968, when on Ian’s sabbatical with their family of three children. She was an assistant professor at the University of Guelph, Department of Zoology, from 1968-1972 where she taught mammalogy, wildlife management and general biology. She became a resource person for Integrated Studies at the University of Waterloo from 1978-1985, the Academic Director for Independent Studies (the same program but renamed) from 1986-1989, and finally senior academic advisor for this program from 1989 to the present.

Anne Innis Dagg started Otter Press in 1972 with the publication of Matrix Optics by Ian Dagg and in 1974 Mammals of Waterloo and South Wellington counties by herself. Other books she has written include: Canadian wildlife and man (McClelland and Stewart, 1974); Mammals of Ontario (Otter Press, 1974); The giraffe: its biology, behavior and ecology with J.B. Foster, (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976; 1982); Wildlife management in Europe (Otter Press, 1977); Running, walking and jumping: the science of locomotion (Wykeham Science Series, 1977); Camel quest: Research on the Saharan camel (York Publishing,1978, 1989); A reference book of urban ecology (Otter Press, 1981); The camel: its ecology, behavior and relationship with man (University of Chicago Press, 1981); Harems and other horrors: sexual bias in behavioral biology (Otter Press, 1983); The fifty per cent solution. Why should woman pay for men’s culture? (Otter Press, 1986); Moreton Island: its history and natural history (Moreton Island Press, 1986); MisEducation: women and Canadian universities (with P.J. Thompson), OISE Press, 1988); User-friendly university: what every student should know (Otter Press, 1994); The feminine gaze: a Canadian compendium of non-fiction women authors and their books, 1836-1945 (Wilfrid University Press, 2001), and five more books since that time.

Anne Dagg died April 1, 2024.