Ryan, John

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Patrick O’Flaherty, “RYAN, JOHN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ryan_john_7E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Printer, newspaperman, office holder, and merchant; b. probably on 7 Oct. 1761 in Newport, R.I.; m. 25 June 1780 Amelia Mott, daughter of John Mott of Long Island, N.Y., and they had eight children; d. 30 Sept. 1847 in St John’s.
    • From his youth, as he would later declare, John Ryan “religiously adhered to his Allegiance” to the British crown. At Newport in the late 1770s he was apprenticed to the loyalist printer John Howe. Ryan’s activities during the American Revolutionary War are obscure, but on the evacuation of Rhode Island in 1779 he accompanied the British army to New York and remained there until 1783. In August 1783 he was co-editor with William Lewis of the New-York Mercury; or, General Advertiser. Ryan arrived on the Saint John River about 17 October as a member of a refugee militia company of loyalists, of which Lewis was captain. With him were his wife, one child, and a servant. He received jointly with Lewis a grant of land in the settlement of Parrtown at the mouth of the river. (In 1785 Parrtown and Carleton were united under the name Saint John.)
    • In 1806 Ryan went to Newfoundland, leaving the Royal Gazette in the hands of his partner William Durant, who had been his apprentice. On 22 September he was given permission by Governor Sir Erasmus Gower to establish a printing-office and weekly newspaper in St John’s.
    • John Ryan was one of Canada’s pioneering printers and newspaper proprietors. He has been credited with establishing an “independent tradition” in New Brunswick journalism; and in Newfoundland his Royal Gazette brought to the attention of a remote and backward colony developments in the great world beyond its headlands. At his death he was described, not without reason, as “the father of the Press in British North America.”
  • Loyalist in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7240
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