May 2010 - Hows that?

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

May 2010 - Hows that?

Post by mardler »

Hello everybody. It's the beginning of summer vacation time in the Northern hemisphere, with three day weekends on both sides of the Atlantic. I took full advantage, despite the traditional English bank holiday weather (cold, wet and windy), and hope you did too.

In the past month we have added almost 1,000 names, thanks to some kind correspondents, to some "marriage challenge" results from the Guild of One-Name Studies and to a change in strategy. We also continue to attract an average two new members per week.

Guild of One-Name Studies
The Guild is a marvellous group of people who support each other's hobby (or is that, obsession?!) in very collaborative ways. For example, within England and Wales, at least, guild members volunteer to go through parish registers for a particular registration district to look for marriages of interest to other members and report them back - the "marriage challenge" mentioned above. With the price of certificates in the UK having risen recently to £9.25, it is a fantastic cost saver. If anyone is interested in learning more about the Guild, because it does so much more than this, do get in touch.

Anyway, this month's marriage challenge results included almost 30 House marriages in Dorset. Every time we receive a marriage notification in this way, we then seek the family in the census records, the result for each one usually being a mini-family tree. In this way, we have dramatically increased our coverage of both the name and the county.

Change in strategy - 1911 UK census
We had a correspondent send in lots of information on births, deaths and marriages in Huntingdonshire and this gave us an idea. The 1911 census in the UK is, for most people there, the most recent publicly available information, and hence the best place to look to find your ancestors, but it can cost quite a bit of money. So our thinking is that if we focus on recording the House/Howes/Hows and Howse families in the 1911 census, we are more likely to have something that will be attractive to people AND we might have saved them some money.

We have a subscription to the 1911 census website with practically unlimited lookups available for a fixed price. Under the terms of their service, we are not allowed to look up data for others, BUT there's nothing to say what our priorities should be. So, if you would like to know where your family lived, who was there and what they did in 1911, just drop us a line and we'll move it to the top of the queue! In addition to Huntingdonshire, we've also been working on Bedfordshire and Berkshire and will continue in alphabetical order, unless you want us to prioritize your family!

19th Century British Newspapers
I may have mentioned this before, but in case not, do look out for your local council library service taking a subscription to this on-line service, with over 2 million fully indexed pages from local newspapers covering much of the UK over the entire century. This is a wonderful resource and when we have time we dip into it to add even more information about people with our four names. We hear that this resource is also available overseas. Check it out.

Finally, this is just a warning to say that in the next few days we will be upgrading the software behind our website. We hope you won't notice, but it is possible that the site may "go down" for a while. Please bear with us and understand that we will fix it as soon as we can.

Thank you again for your continued interest. All the best
Paul
paula howes
Posts: 1
Joined: October 8th, 2009, 6:09 pm

Re: May 2010 - Hows that?

Post by paula howes »

Hi Paul

I would love to know about my family Howes living in Methwold Thetford Norfolk on the 1911 census. I beleve there may have been two or three families there at the time but my Grandmother and Grandfather's names were Arthur Howes and Beatrice Howes.

Many thanks and good luck for the new look site

Paula
peterh3882
Posts: 1
Joined: June 1st, 2010, 12:22 pm

Re: May 2010 - Hows that?

Post by peterh3882 »

Hello Paula,
The 1911 Census shows Arthur W Howes aged 43 years born Methwold
Beatrice A Howes aged 35 born Brixton, London
There are six children, Arthur J b Marylebone, London aged 13, Geoffrey B aged 11 years, Beatrice A aged 9 years, Evelyn L aged 6 years, Constance J aged 3 years, and Aida Elizabeth aged 7 months all born Methwold.

They lived at Wind Mill Inn, Methwold and had 4 lodgers. Arthur worked as a Road Labourer.
They had been married for 14 years and had 6 children, all of whom were living.

Hope this helps, David Howes
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Re: May 2010 - Hows that?

Post by mardler »

Thanks Dave. That was very kind of you. I should have made a note to the effect that I'd already replied to her, saying that the details would go online next time I update the site. I forgot.

My apologies, but also please do be careful because you are probably also precluded from doing direct look-ups for others under the terms of your service agreement with FindMyPast.com.
Paul
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