William McGill was a young man of twenty-three years of age, having been born in 1824. He was a native of Cornwall, but of parents born in other lands - his father was from Ireland and his mother of Huguenot extraction, from the Island of Jersey.

He was instrumentally brought to God and introducted into the Wesleyan Methodist Church by the Rev. Joseph Wesley McCollum, in the spring of 1844.

The following year he received a license to exhort, signed by the presiding chairman of the district, the Rev. John Carroll.

Part of the next Conference year he was employed as a chairman's supply, to assist the Revs. W. Haw and V.B. Howard on the extensive Waterloo Circuit.

He had been very respectably educated in early life, and had followed the profession of school-teaching for several years, in which he gave general satisfaction.

He was light-complexioned, sprightly in manners, and nearly up to medium size. His natural gifts and his assiduity in study combined to make him more than anaverage preacher in point of ability.

...from the minutes of the 1847 Wesleyan Methodist Conference in Toronto C.W.