Paul Douglas
Douglas was born on March 26, 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Annie (Smith) and James Howard Douglas. When he was four, his mother died of natural causes and his father remarried. His father was an abusive husband and his stepmother, unable to obtain a divorce, left her husband and took Douglas and his older brother to Onawa, Maine in Piscataquis County, where her brother and uncle had built a resort in the woods.
John Erskine Douglas
The son of David Douglas, a descendant of James Douglas, 2nd earl of Queensberry, Douglas was born in the later 1750s, and joined the British Royal Navy at a young age, reaching the rank of commander in 1794 at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. Within a year he had been made a post captain and taken command of the small frigate HMS "Garland", which he commanded in the North Sea until 1798, when he transferred to the larger frigate HMS "Boston". "Boston" was stationed off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, intercepting numerous French merchant ships trading with American ports. For a time he blockaded the French frigate "Sémillante", but by 1801 had sailed for the West Indies, operating in the Leeward Islands and then moving north to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he remained until 1804, continuing in employment throughout the Peace of Amiens.