Going round the HOUSEs - November 2017

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

Going round the HOUSEs - November 2017

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. We had an avalanche of new data this month, adding 1,250 people to the database. We finished the month with over 127,280 people in reconstructed families and we still have a large pipeline to work through. An admission: I'm afraid that I have been falling a little behind in my correspondence. It's a situation that I do not see getting any better until I relinquish the post of Chairman of the Guild of One-Name Studies at the end of March. I do try to deal with quick notes and with new correspondents but there is quite a pile of notes building up in my inbox! Do send me a reminder if there's something in there that you think needs urgent attention.

A BIG thank you
Before I do anything else, I want to thank most sincerely, correspondent Pedro (a nickname) for his MOST generous donation of £500 to our certificate buying program. We will spend it wisely and definitely not blow it all at once. I will match you Pound for Pound, to make it last longer. We still have a fair bit in the piggy bank and hopefully will make it last a while. Really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. We also had another small donation from an Australian correspondent who closed out his bank in the UK and transferred the small remaining balance to our account. To all who have donated this year, thank you.

I have a pile of certificates beside me which we purchased earlier in the year just waiting for me to find the time to scan them in and send them to my colleague Mike in Spain to put online for us. We are nearing 3,000 images on our site now, about one half of which are certificates. Most of them have been purchased to solve a problem and put two different small twigs together to make a branch. If you have any Howes, House, Howse, Howze, Hows certificates, please do scan them and send us a copy. 3,000 images sounds like a lot until you remember how many people we have! BTW, modern smartphone photos are just fine too, as long as you can lay the certificate flat.

Sponsorship opportunity?
While we would be happy to take even more money, realistically, we have enough for a while! However, if you have a business and might want some publicity for it, or you know someone who does, how about this young man, Logan Howes? He's only six years old, racing go-karts and winning!
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/meet-the-yo ... -1-5275075
I cannot imagine how expensive motor sport is, but I bet it's a LOT! This boy seems very good at it so far and might be a great winning prospect for a business in the East of England which wants to take a risk! Contact details are in the article.

FamilySearch
While we have been fairly busy with data inundations (and do not stop sending them, by the way! They'll be just fine in my inbox) we have used spare moments while travelling or watching sport or whatever to tidy up our files so that we can send one large data file off to FamilySearch and have it included in the special section on genealogies provided for One-Name Studies.
If you haven't looked there before, go to familysearch.org, click on Search and then on Genealogies. Then at left you will see a box like this:
FSGenealogies.JPG
FSGenealogies.JPG (20.39 KiB) Viewed 2017 times
Click on the Guild of One-Name Studies box and you will see a subset of data, created by other Guild members and thus done with enough care that FamilySearch allows that data to be used as source material for anyone building a tree on that website. You simply link it to your own tree. If by some chance you have a question about that data, you can use the link provided at top right to send the Guild member an email and discuss the matter directly with them. All being well, our Howes/House/etc data will be online within a month or so. The number 492 represents the number of people named Howes in other Guild members' files. At some point I will need to go through them for extra material! Expect that number to be 25,000 or so by the end of January!

The big issue regarding why it's taken us so long since I first talked about it is that FamilySearch is insistent that nobody appears there unless we are sure they are dead or at least over 100 years old. We have many individuals in our database for whom we have no date of birth or death. Familysearch assumes that those people are still alive as there is no death record for them. So we've had to go through over 8,000 records and add "Not known" to the place of death field or, in a relatively small number of examples, a date of birth when the person appears to us like they might be younger than 100, ie, people for whom we were not living up to our confidentiality guarantee. As you can imagine, it's a tedious job! We now have just a few hundred more records to go.

Puzzle corner
Just occasionally, a birth certificate doesn't answer a puzzle at all. It an create a whole new set while not answering the original question for which we made the purchase. Here is one such:
http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename
Can you figure out who this man, William Henry Howse was? Born in 1856 to Samuel Howse and Ellen Barnes, we can't find him in any subsequent record, nor can we find his parents or their marriage. Have we been looking in the wrong places or is he there in Marylebone right under our noses all along? Help please! Write to me at paul(at)howesfamilies(dot)com or leave message in response to this.

Picture
Many British readers will know that the person in the photograph is one Debbie McGee, both assistant to and wife of the late Paul Daniels, magician extraordinaire. Debbie is currently in the final stages of Strictly Come Dancing, the original version of the American equivalent Dancing with the Stars. So what's all the fuss about? Her mother was a Howes and she is thus in our database, as is her spouse. So to anyone watching in Britain, if she's good enough but you cannot decide whom to vote for, give her the benefit of the doubt!
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By the time you read our next newsletter we will have passed most of the holidays, and my son Tim will have married and thus introduced another person to our clan! So I'd like to wish all of you, our correspondents, a very Merry Christmas. Thank you for your continued support.
Paul
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