Brooks family.

Harold Allen Brooks, Sr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1886. He served in the army during World War I and afterwards became a banker. In June 1923, he married Mildred McNeill. McNeill was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1895. She attended Vassar College and was a nurse with the YWCA before marrying Brooks. Both died in the early 1950s.

Harold Allen Brooks, Jr. was born in 1925. Brooks, Jr., received degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A., 1950), Yale University (M.A., 1955), and Northwestern University (Ph.D., 1957). He served in the United States Army. For most of his professional career, Brooks, Jr. taught architectural history at the University of Toronto. He specialized in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, commonly known as Le Corbusier. Brooks, Jr. publications include The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries and Le Corbusier's Formative Years. He also edited the thirty-two volume Le Corbusier Archive and served as president of the Society of Architectural Historians. In 1986, Brooks, Jr. became professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Toronto. He died on August 8, 2010, in Hanover, New Hampshire.