I come across sources that I don’t have time to deal with at the moment—and are unrelated to any research project I’m working on—but I KNOW I’ll have to write about at some point. That’s how I’d characterize the Milner Hotel ledger from 1939.
The two-page excerpt of the registration book at the Milner Hotel from the weekend of February 25-26, 1939 is about as run-of-the-mill as it gets. Names and cities of residence of paying customers, their room numbers, and the time they checked in. Basic.
The Milner Hotel was in Harrisburg, at 426 Market Street. That was very close to the train station and surrounded by other hotels, pool rooms, theaters, and shops. This was a commercial zone, and the Milner was not a luxury hotel.
I happened upon the ledger as the last two pages of a 175-page trial transcript from the Northumberland County Court of Common Pleas. It was evidence in a divorce trial. A man sued for divorce from his wife, whom he alleged had cheated on him with her boss. The couple lived in Sunbury, and the husband entered the ledger into evidence as proof that his wife and the boss had checked in under false names and had spent the night together. For some reason, they took the babysitter with them, and it was the babysitter who had spilled the beans. The girl told the court that the cheating couple used the names “Mr. and Mrs. John Wilson” to check into room 106 at 11:30 PM that night. They said they were from Wilkes-Barre. In the image to the left, you can see the entry as the eighth line.
I briefly planned to do a research project on divorce in central Pennsylvania after I collected transcripts like this one. And I still might. An undergraduate student, Veronica Polyniak, did a great summer project titled “Hitched and Ditched,” in which she surveyed a few divorce cases from Northumberland County. So stay tuned.
