Going round the HOUSEs - January 2017

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

Going round the HOUSEs - January 2017

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. We change the title of these notes every couple of years and if I recal well this one was suggested by a correspondent to me a few months ago.

A puzzle solved
Last month I asked whether anyone knew of the Rev Bruce Howes, likely a Canadian, who used to make model boats, because I couldn't find him in our file. I should have checked better! Correspondent Kathy Messervey wrote in to say that it was her uncle, Kenneth Bruce Howes, a protestant minister in Canada who was born on the island of Montserrat. She provided us with a few aadditional details which we have added to his file, and the picture of the boat will appear on his record shortly. Thank you, Kathy.

Hanged for treason
Bill Howes wrote in to say that he had uncovered an interesting story from some papers in his deceased uncle's files. In 1538, Thomas Howes/Howse of Walsingham in Norfolk was drawn, hanged, beheaded and quartered at Norwich Castle together with several other men for treason toward Henry VIII. I'm from Norfolk and I'd never heard about that and I will spend a little time researching it when I am back in Norfolk in the summer. I did find a reference to the event at Google Books here (https://books.google.com/books?id=tQOoD ... 37&f=false) and it's worth reading if you have some understanding of the minutiae of Tudor politics. I did also find what looked like a better description at Wiley's online library here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... x/abstract BUT you need to have a subscription to open it. Does anyone have such a subscription, please?
More imprtantly, is there anyone out there with family rumour of an execution?

Striving for justice
Remember my story last month about a posible lynching in Mississippi? There was another event which I should have mentioned, which affected two people in our study. I've corresponded off and on over the past year with a gentleman from Pittsburgh named Sala Udin and have helped him as far as I can with his own family history (I didn't get him very far . . . yet). Sala's original name was Samuel Howze. The first time we talked he told me of two young girls named House (possibly related) who were thrown off a bridge to their deaths in a lynching in Shubuta, MS, a story that has haunted him his entire life. Sala has had an active life in Pittsburgh politics and in the South. He was recently interviewed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a series of vignettes about his life. If you read about the civil rights struggles of black people in the deep South in the 1960s but never knew much of the detail I whole-heartedly recommend reading these eye-opening stories, here: http://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com ... -the-hill/.

Genealogy time-wasters?
Since the 1960s, various firms on both sides of the Atlantic have been selling one-page Histories of the Howes Name, often with a "family crest" and in frames. They're usually on brown paper made to look old. Do you have a copy of one? Could you scan it or take a picture with your cell phone and mail it to me, please? What I'd like to do is to go through these and analyze them. I'll make a web-page of the results and tell you what is correct, what is speculation and what is incorrect, as best I can.

My travels
I'm in Salt Lake City for two weeks, to do some research and attend RootsTech. If you are in the area and/or attending RootsTech and would like to meet up, do drop me a line to paul (at) howesfamilies.com.
Similarly, I'm doing a couple of presentations at the North Florida Genealogy Conference in early March. If you are in the Jacksonville area, this is a good day out. See the website for the conference here:
https://nfgenealogyconference.org/2017/ ... aul-howes/

Howes place-names
I saw this evening that Richard Howes had made a post on our message boards about Howes Valley, up-country from Newcastle in New South Wales. Does anyone know how the place got its name?
Vivien Moore wrote in too to say that she had seen an article at the website of British History Online (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/) about the old hamlet of Howes just North of Cambridge, about which I have written before. That website has a huge list of references to our name from old British records and appears to have grown a lot since I last checked it out. Anyone who wants to research some of the stories would be greatly welcomed! Anyway, I just wanted to note that there are references to places named Howes in Leicestershire and the old county of Rutland too. Finding more places lends more credibility to a place name or names being an origin for our surname.

And finally
We only added 560 people this month, though we did add over 5,000 facts to the database. We passed a couple of milestones:
- we now have over 30,000 people named Howes at birth in our database (and 15,000+ Houses and over 5,000 Howses)
- we now know the identity of both couples for over 17,000 marriages in England and Wales out of a total of 23,800 or so from 1837 to 1950. This is our main indicator of progress, at least with our British family reconstruction efforts. Great to feel that we are firmly on the downslope!

All the best
Paul
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