March 2011 - Howse that?

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mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

March 2011 - Howse that?

Post by mardler »

So many things to report this month. Let's get right down to it.

Web resources
Hope you were able to use Ancestry's free online day last weekend. Also, a new website has come to my attention: Mocavo.com. It's a search engine dedicated to family history. You put your names in and should get much more focused material back than you would on google. My only criticism so far is that their engine is swamped by TNG's linked web pages: one search I did gave 55 web-pages, 53 of which came from our site! Searching for William Howes gave almost 9,000 results! I had to go down four pages to find one not from this site! I so hope they'll fix it as they go along or people will get bored with us!

Continued growth
We passed three hundred registered users this month, continuing to grow by about ten every month. Most people share some data with us, which is terrific. With that and our regular efforts, we added a much more reasonable 800 people this month to top 37,500. We can expect to be over 50,000 people before the next Olympiad at this rate!

We also finished working through nearly seventy “marriage challenge” results from the Guild of One-Name Studies for Poplar in Essex, North Aylesford in Kent and the city of Nottingham.

Merged individuals and families
We try our best to connect people into families as we work through census records, but we don't always succeed which increases the chance that one person will be in the database more than once. However, the more information we have in the database, the easier it is to find those rogue relatives and fit the pieces of the jigsaw back together again. It's a good sign that we merged nearly 50 individuals' records this month, though it does slow the apparent rate of growth!

We actually had one person on the database four different times and hadn't connected her to the rest of her family until we had all the pieces in one place and could verify it from her occupation or whom she lived with. Part of the reason for that was that every age she gave on the census was very different, her implied year of birth varying by 23 years over the course of her life. So don't give up on some of those odd pieces of data in the corners of your collection!

We also put in significant effort around, and found large numbers of merges between families, in Walthamstow in London, and Lound on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. If you have family from those areas, please do go back and check again what we now have. It could well have changed dramatically in the last few weeks.

On a personal note, when I started this site, one of the purposes was to knock down my own three Howes “brick walls”. Thanks to a distant cousin in Australia we now have proof that we are related and have been able to move that wall back a further generation. We have merged two entire families into one. It's always pleasing to move one's own personal goals forward.

Weird, but true
Not put off by last month's poker hand, in our weird column this month are a grandfather, father and son, William, Charles and Charles Howes, all from the area between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth and all of whom married women of the same name, Elizabeth Smith. Not to be outdone, William's son Thomas married an Eliza Smith!

Teaser
I hope next month to make a major announcement about the future of this site!
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Re: March 2011 - Howse that?

Post by mardler »

A small postscript: we are all used to British marriage certificates from the post-1837 era after national registration. But how did people prove they were married before then? They went to the vicar and paid for an extract from the parish register.

If you go here: http://www.howesfamilies.com/showmedia.php?mediaID=675, you will see such an extract from the marriage register of St George, Hanover Square in London. The original register entry was from 1812 and the extract was from 1831. The family later emigrated and this piece of paper has been in the possession of the family ever since, i.e., 170 years!

Our sincere thanks go to Helen Carbonaro (my Australian relative mentioned above) for sharing it with us.

Interestingly, the register of St George's now online at Ancestry.com shows a different groom's name but is otherwise the same. We are happy that the extract is correct and I have my suspicions that the parish register was re-written at some point, or at least that another copy exists. If anyone can shed light on this, please do let me know or post here directly.
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