(23 June 1884-11 March 1970), historian. (W. S. Wallace, W. Stewart Wallace) Born at Georgetown, Ont. He died in Toronto. W. S. Wallace attended the University of Toronto and Oxford University. He taught in universities from 1906, and served in WWI, and from 1923 to 1954 was librarian of the University of Toronto. He was not a Glengarrian, and had no close GC connections, but his biographical sketches of the Nor’Westers constitute one of the most important contributions ever made to the study of GC history. These sketches can be found in the successive editions of his A Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1926, later called The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography), in the biographical dictionary subsection of his Documents Relating to the North West Company (Toronto, The Champlain Society, 1934), and in his Encyclopedia of Canada (1935-1937), with related material also in a few other of his many publications. To prepare these sketches, he did hard research in difficult materials, contending with inadequate sources and with the peculiarly Scottish problem of the duplication of names. See Farquhar D. McLennan.
The Glengarry historian Hugh P. MacMillan remembered gratefully that when MacMillan was a young researcher and history buff, Wallace arranged for him to jump the queue to become a member of the Champlain Society. Biog. sketch of Wallace in MDict, Hurtig, Story * Bibliography of Glengarry: index