March 2013 - Hows it going?

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

March 2013 - Hows it going?

Post by mardler »

Quite a month, folks. We managed to score a day at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston and three more days at the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City. From these and other efforts, we added almost 2,000 people to our database in March.

Liking HowesFamilies.com
Every page on the website now has a Share button toward the top right corner. Please do click on it and share one or more interesting pages on your social media sites! Thanks in advance.

Sherlock Howes
Early in the month we were contacted by Paul Finch, who is a postcard collector. He had found a postcard from around 1925 of a storefront in England belonging to an "O A Howes" and wanted help in identifying the shopkeeper and the location. It took less than 15 minutes to find the answer! The shop belonged to an Oscar Howes and was situated about 400yards from where I grew up in Norwich! See: http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename for a scan of the postcard.

We're quite pleased during the month too to have traced two Michigan families (one Howes and one House) back to their "home villages" in the UK: Wacton in Norfolk and Walton in Somerset. If you have a connection to either place you may find you have "new" family!

Help from Guild of One-Name Studies members
It's been a bumper month for interaction with other Guild members. We've had the results from several "marriage challenges" run by Guild members where they look up marriage register entries for other members, for example, for Worcester, Aston and St George Hanover Square in London. Apart from them,
  • Kevin Hurley of the Peapell One-Name Study managed to find some early House references from 14th century Poll tax returns in Wiltshire
  • Phil Hand of the Hickling One-Name Study found a marriage certificate for a Hickling/Howes marriage certificate
  • Several Guild members and I swapped notes on three very handy websites for New Zealand genealogy:
    http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies - Dictionary of NZ biography
    http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz - Past NZ newspapers
    http://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/Home/ - NZ BDM
  • At the RootsTech conference, I was pleased to meet over a dozen Guild members!
DNA testing
Then, Debbie Kennett of the Cruwys One-Name Study has written a really good piece in layman's language on the uses of DNA in family history. You can find it here: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/blog.p ... na-testing.
We are now able to source DNA tests through the Guild for £80 or local currency equivalent. If you are interested, please do get in touch.

Milestones
We've passed a couple more milestones on our study this month:
  • We now have more than 10,000 people named House in our database
  • We now know the identity of both partners for more than 12,000 marriages in England and Wales between 1837 and 1950 - that's over 50% and so we are now on the downslope!
For the record, we now have 74,686 people in the database and over 540,000 facts.

Corporal David Robert Howes
Finally, I want to mention a very unusual homily. 25 years ago this month, two British soldiers happened upon an IRA funeral in Belfast and were themselves killed. One was Corporal Howes. The killings were witnessed by a catholic woman who this month wrote a letter to the soldiers' father. Regardless of whatever feelings you may have about the British in Ireland, this letter is uniquely touching and I think worth a read. You can find it here: http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename
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