January 2013 - Howes it going?

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mardler
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Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

January 2013 - Howes it going?

Post by mardler »

Happy new month, everyone.

A lasting legacy
First, a giant thanks to our contributors. This month we have received several assorted corrections and additions from people with whom we have corresponded before and from some new correspondents. Most interesting was a book which we received from Nicholas Howes, whose grandfather, Leonard Vincent Howes, chronicled the ancestry of his Howes forebears ultimately back to seafaring folk in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk and others from Scotland and Ireland to their new life in Australia. It's a wonderful legacy for his descendants and an example to us all of how to write up your family history. I wish I could share the whole book with everyone, but I have to return it, with grateful thanks!

A small postscript on history
We do like to note how people with our name have made a difference to the world in which they lived. A correspondent, Niki Carpenter, shared with us that her ancestor Arthur Howse (http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename) from Kidlington in Oxfordshire was a Grenadier Guardsman selected to be a pall bearer of Queen Victoria's casket at her funeral in 1901. That was quite an honour; he must have been an exceptional soldier to have been so selected. Niki shared with us a couple of pictures of him (which will go online shortly) and an interesting obituary telling of his 45 years as a Methodist preacher which you can read at the page above.

Privacy
As of tonight there are 71,360 people in our database in total, but you can only see details for 59,885. The difference is all those people born within the last 100 years whom we do not know to have died.

We take our privacy policy seriously. If there is anyone born within the last 100 years whose details you can see, please let us know and we will fix it immediately. At some point, we would like to extend the ability of people to see (and help manage) details for their living relatives. Within the software we use, we can do it by assigning people to different family branches but we need to be sure that we have the correct branches and that means at least another couple of years work on the 19th century records first. So please bear with us.

Bostonian Howes Oxford Shoes
Can anyone enlighten us on the origins of this brand? See http://origin-staging.footsmart.com/p-b ... 84435.aspx for an example. How did the Howes name get in there? Coming from a family of shoemakers myself, I'm more than averagely curious about it!

Multiple names
We continue to encounter scepticism about the links between House and Howes names. Many people named House in the US have their surname origins in Germany (and possibly the Netherlands) but for those whose origins lie in England, it's now almost beyond doubt that the names come from a common origin.

The evidence for the fact that the names used to sound the same is overwhelming. Consider two more examples which we found this month:
http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename - this is for Henry House from Darlaston in North Staffordshire. We've only found this man in four records so far and he was recorded with a different spelling of his name each time!
http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename - this is the record of Richard Howse, also from Staffordshire. His name was also recorded with all four of our major spelling variants but most notable is that his children were recorded with at least three of them - check the list of children.

Guest blog
If you've looked at the site in the past few days, you'll perhaps have seen that we are sporting a new badge on our front page: that of guest blogger for Ancestry.co.uk. If you'd like to read the blog click on the badge. If you like it, feel free to then click the "like" button for Facebook or "+1" if you prefer Google+! In the next few days, another site with a HowesFamilies blog will appear and we will contribute more articles more regularly to that site. More next month.

Thank you for your continuing support
Paul
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