RIAMCO

Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online

For Participating Institutions

John E. Rovensky papers (RLC.Ms.004)

Redwood Library and Athenaeum

50 Bellevue Avenue
Newport, RI 02840
Tel: (401) 847-0292
Fax: (401) 841-5680
email: redwood@redwoodlibrary.org

Scope & content

This collection consists primarily of correspondence and photographs concerning John E. Rovensky’s business career and personal life. Correspondence was from and sent to his second wife, Maisie, his daughter, business associates, and other friends and family. Of interest are the 1939 letters Rovensky received from the young daughters of J. Stillman Rockefeller (1902-2004), Rovensky’s assistant at City Bank in the 1930s, in which they asked Rovensky to let their father take some time off to enjoy a vacation with them at their grandparents’ home in Georgia.

Photographs include images of Rovensky as a young man in Pennsylvania taken in 1903 looking well and healthy after his recovery from tuberculosis as well as photographs of Rovensky later in his life, his residences in Newport and Palm Beach, banks where he worked, and images of the estate sale he organized for William Randolph Hearst. The organizational chart for the Hearst Corporation in 1938 is also found within this collection.

After Rovensky retired, he was active in researching his family history, which is reflected in the genealogies he compiled for his ancestors, the Wallenstein family. The undated maps of Bohemia and his personal copy of the book Der Adel von Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien (The nobility of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia) were used by Rovensky for this purpose. Besides researching his ancestry, Rovensky also wrote a memoir detailing his business career, achievements, and social activities which is found in this collection.

Miscellaneous items are comprised of unpublished articles written by Rovensky on banking and economics, dinner invitations and programs, and a sermon given to the First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, for Mother’s Day in 1930. Also included are obituaries for John E. Rovensky clipped from newspapers in Florida, New York and Rhode Island in February 1970.