Mash, thank you very much for your reply. I agree with you regarding privacy issues and newspapers.com notices. So far, the most informative reply, though not the one I wanted to see, came from Debra Hirsh, via Tracing The Tribe group on facebook: [answering your question,] "as someone who got into the hotel industry WAY after that. I'm going to say, probably not. I was in the industry for 30 years and we kept things 7 years as a rule."

Since my original post, A30 Canadian Immigrations cards for the man and his wife were discovered. I now know the couple’s names, so the more realistic next step seems to look for burials of any ‘Lester’-looking names in Toronto, in the hope that there will be a Hebrew part of a tombstone reading Naftoli b. Ber, or Nechame b. Moshe.

Boris