House your father - May 2015

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

House your father - May 2015

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. During each month, I make a few notes for items for my month-end newsletter. This month, somehow they all disappeared when I needed them! So this is largely from memory.

Alyssa Howes and her service dog
During May there was a lovely story about this young girl, named Alyssa, who lives in the Los Angeles area and suffers from frequent fits. Her family has just received a dog which is trained to bark when it senses a fit coming on, thus alerting the family and enabling them to care better for her, but also allowing both her and them more independence. Check out the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/dogs-sniff-seizur ... 33803.html. Does anyone know this family? We don't have anyone named Alyssa Howes in our database.

What I found particularly fascinating about this story is how it has reverberated around the world. I have a daily internet alert set up and every day for over a week the story appeared in my list of stories, reported from as far away from LA as New Delhi! It seems to have captured the hearts of journalists and readers everywhere. Although many things have changed over the years, it seems that journalists are behaving exactly the same today as they did in the 19th century, picking up stories from far away places and repeating them in their own newspaper as if their own reporters had written it!

Gordon Howes or House or Howse, died in Portland, Victoria, Australia
During the month we were contacted by the Port of Portland about this man who died with a colleague during the construction of grain silos at the port in 1969, aged 28. They are intending to hold a memorial service for these two men in November this year and include any living relatives. Can you help identify this man whose name is spelt three different ways in the press articles of the time which the port authority has shared with us?

Based on information from distant family members we had identified this man as Gordon Howes from Woodford Halse in Northamptonshire, England who married a lady named Alice. However, we now have doubts, since a death notice was placed in the Portland Observer by his widow named Yvonne. If you can help, please do let me know. Paul .at. howesfamilies.com.

"Cancer is pants"
cancerispants.jpg
cancerispants.jpg (35.55 KiB) Viewed 1826 times
I couldn't resist sharing this picture and article about a Howes family in Brighton, England who are trying to raise money for their mother's cancer treatment by wearing underpants as headgear. The article referred to below is quite extensive and worth a read, especially if your family has been touched by the "Big C"
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/12925556 ... r_of_four/ If you would like to help, the URL is http://www.cancerispants.co.uk/

Progress report
British genealogy researchers are quite lucky in that since registration began in 1837 they now have a master checklist of all births, deaths and marriages. Between 1837 and 1950, there were about 23,800 marriages for people with one of our study names. We keep track of our progress by monitoring the number of marriages for which we can identify both partners. This month we passed the 15,000 milestone and now have just over 8,700 left to find. Of that 15,000 number, we know the actual location of the marriage for 6,000. If you have knowledge of any Howes/etc marriages, or any certificates you could scan in and send to us, we'd be very grateful to hear from you.

Finally, just a note to say that we now have over 98,200 people in our database, having added over 900 in May. Every month, when I say thank you for your continued support, I really do mean it!
Paul
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