As part of my Ancestry membership I have a basic membership to the website Newspapers.com. I upgraded to the premium membership when I realized that I did not have access to many of the newspapers. Recently I broke down and got a membership to Newspaperarchive.com. While Newspapers.com has newspaper archives for the newspaper where I currently live, Newspaperarchive.com has newspaper archives from where my ancestors used to live. So you see why I opted for both.

I’ve talked about how useful Obituaries are before, but since I found a couple of interesting articles doing research for someone, I’d thought I’d share how newspaper articles can give us information beyond birth, marriage and death.

John Romans was the proprietor of Waverley House, a “well known and first class” boarding house (if the ads are to be believed). I have him on one census record and I have his death record, as well as in a handful of Halifax directories. If I ever get to Halifax, I can research probate and land records at the archives, but other than that, as he died in 1872, there isn’t much else to find on him during this time period. We don’t know how he came to be the owner of this hotel, and even if we find the land record showing the purchase of this property, it still doesn’t give us much detail about who John Romans was. Enter the newspapers.

According to a letter published in two parts Halifax British Colonist on October 16 and 18, 1851, John Romans was dismissed from his post as overseer of the Distilleries in Halifax. He was hired to work for the Distilleries six or seven years prior, his job previous to that being the Collector of Excise for the District of Truro. The letter writer goes on to discuss what a great job Mr. Romans was doing in managing the facility, how he asked for a raise for his good work, received it, continued to increase revenues for the business, asked for another raise given that he had to “walk not less than 15 miles every day wet or dry, summer or winter” (no word on whether it was uphill both ways). He was not given that raise, and from what I understand of the letter, due to politics at the time, was later dismissed from his post. The letter writer goes on to talk about how the distillery has since decreased its revenues. It was signed by “one of the people.”

Given that Mr. Romans had “a large family to provide for, and no sympathizing funds to fall back upon,” what was he to do?

Luckily, his wife, Martha Romans, had opened up a boarding house:

Grand Parade is a civic square located in Halifax. The property that she bought was located at 8 Barrington St, the former property of Chief Justice Blowers, according to an advertisement in Halifax British Colonist November 1, 1851.

I’m not sure at what point John decided he, and not his wife, was the proprietor of the hotel, as we can see in this ad from the Halifax Citizen May 20, 1871:

So now we have a much fuller picture of who John Romans was and when he got into the Hotel business. That was certainly worth the price of a subscription.