Kenneth Earl Kidd was born in Barrie, Ontario, on July 21, 1906, the elder son of Daniel Ferguson Kidd and Florence May (Jebb) Kidd of Cookstown, Ontario. The first four years of his life were spent in the hamlet of Egbert, before his parents moved to the ancestral Kidd farm in West Gwillimbury Township. He grew up in Cookstown, attended Public and Continuation School there, and completed his secondary school education at Barrie Collegiate Institute. He attended the University of Toronto (Victoria College), graduating in Honours English and History in 1931, followed by a year at the Ontario College of Education. After a short interval of teaching at the Brantford Collegiate and the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Kidd accepted an appointment in the Department of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, where he remained for the next thirty years. Simultaneously, he obtained an M.A. degree from the University of Toronto in Anthropology and History. He then took leave to attend summer school in archaeology at the University of New Mexico, and a scholarship enabled him to continue his anthropological studies for a year at the University of Chicago, where he met Martha Ann Maurer, a Master of Fine Arts Graduate from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. They were married in 1943. Biography by Martha Ann Kidd.
