Maud had been a founding student in 1925 of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr Institute), and took design and composition classes from Varley after he joined the school in 1926. Maud and her father Ruiter Stinson Sherman were also Charter Members of the B.C. Art League, a group founded to help create both the art school and the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Shermans were also members of other arts and nature groups, and the two of them wrote and illustrated scores of stories published in School Days magazine and in schoolbooks published by J.M. Dent and Sons, as well as other journals.

The Sherman family was important to the development of art, natural history, and education in Vancouver and British Columbia, and the descendants of the family continue to contribute to this day. My research went in all directions and became so complex that I began writing my progress as a journal, currently comprising over 100,000 words, with an extensive collection of artwork and historic photographs. A number of spin-off articles have been published, but the real work of finishing the book remains.