During that turbulent period in Britain’s history when Sir Francis Drake’s buccaneering exploits had Spain by the ears and intrepid Champlain was spying out the boundaries of Bay of Quinte, there flourished under the checkered reign of the first James in bonny Scotland, Herbert Biggar, and it is a coincidence that centuries after his descendents settled on the rim of the bay where the great explorer had camped. This Scottish gentleman was Laird of Barbine and Nethergloly and espoused Janet Maxwell, Balterson, in the Parish of Holyrood, who survived, dying in 1689, and their children were the ancestors of the subject of this sketch. William Hodgins Biggar, called to the Bar in 1880, twice Mayor of Belleville, and in 1890 elected M.P.P. for West Hastings, Ontario, now director of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, and vice-president and General Counsel of the Grand Trunk Railway, was born in September, 1852, at the Carrying Place, an historic portage where no doubt, Samuel de Champlain and his Indian allies carried from Quinte Bay to Lake Ontario their supplies and canoes. Late in the autumn, two thirds of a century ago when older units of the family were sailing westward with equipment and settlers’ impedimenta enroute their original location near Brantford, Canada, the voyageurs were frozen in and stalled by winter’s rigors and thus fate or fortune, unsolicited, determined a new world habitation, giving point to the proverb, “There is a destiny which shapes our ends rough hew them as we may”. From here it was that James Lyons Biggar, general merchant, often journeyed in the interests of East Northumberland to parliament in far off Quebec before Confederation and this sturdy trader of pioneering days was wont to accompany goods shipments from tidewater by wagon, coach and vessel to their western destination. “There is luck in odd numbers”, said Rory O’More and as young Biggar was but one of nine lusty children--all of whom later attained individual prominence--he was not featured as a favorite. Who can tell to what influence his Celtic mother from the city of Dublin, whose surname and temperament he inherited, attributed the success of her son, perchance the good fairies or to the “Luck in odd numbers”. The acquisition of knowledge was easy for him because he gave the task his attention and his inclinations developed system in study. His preliminary education in the village and at Trenton Grammar School, culminated with the gilt lettered honor of Head Boy at Upper Canada College, Toronto, and that distinction has since been bestowed on one of his four children, Winchester, on the eve of his entry to McGill University and gravitation to the army. The mother of the interesting trio and the curley-headed dictator of the family, was Miss Marie Louise Ballou of New York.