This is a radical suggestion not based on any proof but John Lind claims that you can´t find any information about the Romanowitz family within the Russian source material. The name Romanowitz would imply that the family would be of Polish Livonian origin rather than Russian. If they were a Russian noble family they would have been called Romanov or something similar.
Maybe the name Romanowitz was in fact Romanowicz? As a native Swedish speaker I can see how we can´t really pronounce the "wicz" ending without making it a soft T. We prounence Romanowicz like Romanowitz, perhaps not with a hard T but with a soft T.
If you are searching for the origin of the Romanowitz family, maybe it could be worth it searching for a Romanowicz family within the source material for Livonia as well? Maybe it could be as Lind suggested that the Romanowitz family are in fact of Polish origin but lived with Russian boyar families in modern day Estonia do to the shared Slavic cultural and linguistical similarities.
