Hello everyone. What a month! Four presentations! Just one more next month and then done for a while
We managed to add a creditable 850 people this month and now have over 96,400 people in our database. I was going to make a reasonable estimate of when we might reach six figures but things have changed a little. Read on!
The Guild of One-Name Studies
You will know that this is a One-Name Study. I've been a member of the Guild for six years now and served on the committee for a couple of years, stepping down when I moved to Florida a year ago. A few weeks ago, the chairman of the Guild invited members to volunteer to serve on the committee as they might be a little light for 2015. I answered the call, after hearing an inspirational speech about society management at the FGS/Rootstech conference in Salt Lake City.
Imagine my surprise when on Saturday at the Guild's annual conference, I was proposed and then elected as their chairman! It was not in my plans, but I am willing to serve. The Guild is a wonderful organization, with the most collaborative group of 2,600 people you could ever want to be a part of and I'm humbled to be selected. Indeed several of our readers are Guild members with Howes/etc ancestors and I'm sure they will back me up. We all gain by working together and supporting each other, even though each of us has a unique approach to our unique studies.
For sure, I will continue to answer correspondence and manage the database, but my own efforts at data entry will have to slow down dramatically. Hence my reluctance to promise a date for six figures.
Three other things about the Guild:
1) while at Rootstech I was interviewed about the Guild, together with Tessa Keough, the Guild's US national representative. You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1fV2AGwDeM
2) our website has also won an Award for Excellence from the Guild. Very proud of it, because it's a team effort not just from those of us actively working on it, but also everyone who has shared information with us, including pointing out the occasional inaccuracy! Thank you.
3) just a reminder that I will be a presenter at the Who Do You Think You Are? Live event in Birmingham, England on Saturday morning, April 18. If you can get there on the Thursday, Friday or Saturday, you'll find me mostly near the Guild's stand at the event. Leave a message with your cellphone number if you miss me and I'll text you back.
A free resource
Hope a few people managed to get some value from our pointer towards FindMyPast's free weekend last month. This month's suggestion is particularly helpful to US researchers but does also have information for other places too, in much lower quantities. The US magazine Genealogy in Time has three separate search engines at http://genealogyintime.com/, one for individual references, one for people in trees and one for books. I'm a tiny bit miffed that none has not apparently indexed our site, but hey, it's a free resource! The magazine offers a free weeky newsletter too. Worth a look.
In Howes-related news
Robert and Eileen Howes of Rooty Hill, New South Wales in Australia celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary this month. There's a delightful picture of them and their family here:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslo ... 7259957748. We don't have this couple in our database and haven't had time to research them. Does anyone know anything more about them?
During the month while working on a family who lived in Utah, all of whom were named Howes I spotted that one of the gravestones, the one of the matriarch, Sarah, who died in 1903 was spelt HAWES. See a picture of the image here: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg ... i=10060947 Obviously, spelling standards were not exactly the same a hundred years ago but stonemasons almost everywhere could spell. I'm curious how this could have happened and not be corrected. Any ideas?
Got ancestors in Southern Africa?
New data is appearing on the web almost by the minute. I can't keep up, but happened to spot that FamilySearch has just loaded it's first file for Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia, Deaths from 1904 to 1976. Interested to see what a Zimbabwean death certificate looked like I added all ten Howes/House entries to our database and was able thanks to the information they contain to connect them to families in our database. In at least three cases people had moved there from England and we would never otherwise have found their deaths. If you believe your ancestor might have lived in Southern Africa that database is worth checking out.
New York marriages, again
You may recall our story about marriage tourism last month. Our work on New York marriages in Salt Lake City continues to pay dividends. Clearly all manner of people married in the city. A Howes man with an unusual set of given names married in 1905 in New York and while all the details didn't match, there were enough similarities that made us cross-reference his record with that of an eponymous man with a wife and four children in England.
During March, a modern member of that man's family (not a descendant) wrote in to say that the man jumped ship in Malta and gave us sufficient information to be able to connect the two database records. The man's family never heard any more after his jumping ship and so we were able to provide them with more detail from the marriage and subsequent US records.
One obviously has sympathy for the innocent wife and children given the lack of a social safety net in 1903. They must have endured tough times indeed. I'm also sparing a thought as to what was going through the man's mind to have absconded from the Royal Navy as well as his family, never to see them again. Sad story.
Howse your father? - March 2015
Re: Howse your father? - March 2015
Correspondent Nancy Bradley wrote to me to say: Hi Paul: I was watching Genealogy Road Show (a US TV program) the other evening and one of the researchers explained that the reason a name may appear differently is largely based on who is gathering info. Phonetically is how they would spell things. Perhaps that is what happened in the Hawes situation.
Thanks for that, Nancy
Paul
Thanks for that, Nancy
Paul
Re: Howse your father? - March 2015
Correspondent Nancy Bradley wrote to me to say: Hi Paul: I was watching Genealogy Road Show (a US TV program) the other evening and one of the researchers explained that the reason a name may appear differently is largely based on who is gathering info. Phonetically is how they would spell things. Perhaps that is what happened in the Hawes situation.
Thanks for that, Nancy
Paul
Thanks for that, Nancy
Paul