Minns, William

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: George L. Parker, “MINNS, WILLIAM,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/minns_william_6E.html
  • DCB profile:
    • Printer, publisher, merchant, and office holder; b. c. 1763 in Boston, son of William Minns and his wife Sarah; m. 29 Dec. 1798 Sophia Brown in Halifax, and they had one daughter, Sophia Ann; d. there 17 Jan. 1827.
    • William Minns was one of seven children born to a Boston doctor whose family had emigrated from Great Yarmouth, England, about 1735. During the evacuation of Boston in March 1776, young Minns and his sister Martha went to Newport, R.I., where she married the printer John Howe. Apparently Minns’s loyalist views offended his father; nevertheless, over the years he maintained contact with his Massachusetts relatives, and several of his Boston nieces lived with him in Halifax during the 1810s and 1820s.
    • Newport was evacuated by British forces in October 1779, and it seems to have been then that Minns left Rhode Island for Nova Scotia. By 1780, when John Howe began the Halifax Journal, Minns was probably an apprentice in his brother-in-law’s Halifax printing shop. He soon established his own shop at George and Barrington streets, from which he first issued the Weekly Chronicleon 29 April 1786. Like the two other Halifax newspapers of the day, the Journal and Anthony Henry*s Nova-Scotia Gazette, and the Weekly Chronicle, Minns’s paper chiefly reprinted British and American news, although it also carried more detailed local news than the others.
  • United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=13129
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74256145/william-minns