March 2009

Still almost monthly!
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mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

March 2009

Post by mardler »

End of the month again, fellow thrill seekers! Time for a further update on our progress after another solid month.

Data update, a new facility
This website is dedicated to bringing people with the HOWES (or HOWSE or HOWS) name together. But what if you can’t link to anyone yet in the database and can’t see any familiar names, like good old Uncle Engelbert? We now have the start of an answer. Thanks to much hard work from Ian and Dave we now have a complete listing of all Howes births in England and Wales from July 1837 through December 1930. This facility is actually more accurate than all of the online sources since we have either worked from the original images or checked our work against them and informed the online source of over a hundred corrections. The new searchable database is available here:
http://www.one-name.org/cgi-bin/archive ... tudy=Howes
I want to record my personal thanks to the both of them for their work. Dave is now beavering away on marriage records.
Is there someone out there who might volunteer to take on Scotland, New Zealand, one or more Australian states, or some other place for us, perhaps? Could such an index be made for Canada or US? Can anyone enlighten me?

Some areas of the database that have had some attention this month include:
- South London and associated families, where Ian made a fantastic job on this which led to the addition of almost 1,500 names and families hailing from all over the UK
- Towcester, in Northamptonshire
- Hickling in Norfolk where I worked direct from microfilms of the parish registers and believe we have finally untangled the webs woven by two Williams born within a couple of years of each other at the beginning of the 19th century and who had children with similar names at similar times, two of whom actually married each other! This information was supplemented and confirmed by certificates obtained just in the past few days by Dave, whose family has roots in the village.
- Gloucestershire, just outside of Bristol
- a family descended from one of the Howes Brothers of 19th century circus fame
- Bunwell (the village where my mother grew up and I was baptized) and Long Stratton in Norfolk
- We also added information from 30 birth, marriage and death certificates and put those online.
Interesting too that I have had emails from two people this month updating the information that we already had received from them. These really were most encouraging signs, because it shows more people feel some psychological ownership in the site. That's what we want!

Current state
We now have 12,800 people listed in the database and 79 people registered on the site. Thank you all for your continued interest.

Another volunteer
As hinted at above, Ian and I have been joined by Dave from Germany and we are now “on a promise” from a new volunteer from Sydney, Australia. We hope that will spread the load rather than just increase the total amount of data going onto the site.

A success story
With one marriage certificate we were able to show Tony that a particular pub in East Dereham in Norfolk had been run by two different parts of his family and make a connection that took his family back almost 400 years to a Samuel Howes in Great Yarmouth in the early 1600s.

A poignant note to close
I had mentioned before that Cheryl had managed to trace her Howes family all the way from Salt Lake City, Utah back to Norwich and thence to Catfield in Norfolk, the original family "seat". She had even found the family registered on a particular company's wagon train from Iowa to Utah. Well, she has traced the written diary of another member of the wagon train who notes with sadness the death of Sister Howes' daughter and solve a mystery of the poor little child's final resting place. Great piece of research, Cheryl.

Happy new month tomorrow, everybody
Paul
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