100,000+ - Howes that? - June 2015

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

100,000+ - Howes that? - June 2015

Post by mardler »

Hello folks. Thanks to your continued support and the efforts of my cousin, Ian Howes, Mike Howes and others who work on our site, I'm pleased to announce that as of this evening we have 100,006 people in our database. I honestly did not think that we would get to this number anywhere nearly as fast as we have, especially when we are getting more rigorous about how we go about our work: the average number of facts per person is also going up even as we add new people.

I can not thank everybody enough.

Forepaugh Chalice, aka Howes Chalice
Is there anyone reading this who lives near York, England and would be prepared to go to York Minster to take a picture or two for us?

The reason I ask is connected to Seth Benedict Howes, the circus entrepreneur. Seth was a fascinating man who sold his circus to one P T Barnum, and invested the proceeds in Chicago real estate. When he died in 1901, he was worth $2million or $20 million, depending upon which report you read. He had a house named Morningthorpe in Putnam County, NY in the grounds of which he had built a church. His second wife, Amy, whom he had met and married in England was clearly a devout Christian woman and upon her death in 1927, she willed a large donation to York Minster, the #2 church in all of England. A silver chalice was made, containing a 27-carat diamond.

The chalice is still in the possession of York Minster, and we would dearly love a picture of it to go on Amy's record. The chalice is named Forepaugh after Amy's niece who visited the Minster (and who herself came from another circus family) though it ought really to be better named the Howes chalice! Anyway, I've been in touch with the curators at York Minster and while they would need some paperwork to be completed, they are happy for someone to take a picture and for us to publish it. Can anyone save me a ten-hour drive there and back, please?!

Morningthorpe on the market
Morningthorpe Manor (source: EDP24.co.uk)
Morningthorpe Manor (source: EDP24.co.uk)
morningthorpe.jpg (140.25 KiB) Viewed 1842 times
Oh, and while we are on the subject of Morningthorpe, the original manor house in Norfolk, England is up for sale. See picture and http://www.edp24.co.uk/property/morning ... _1_4101189. Although a prominent Howes family lived there in 18th and 19th centuries, no proven connection has ever been made to the US line of Thomas and Mary Howes. We live in hope of finding a living Howes male from the Morningthorpe family to be able to test their DNA against that of Thomas and Mary's male descendants, but so far as we can tell, the Morningthorpe line has "daughtered out". It's a pity too because that's our oldest Howes line with the patriarch, Richard Howys, dying in 1457. Please prove me wrong and find someone!

Anyone interested in helping?
From time to time I ask whether anyone is interested in helping but I have note been specific. So from now on I'm going to tell you about a database where it might be an interesting job for someone to solve a few puzzles for us. I just learned today that the UK National Maritime Museum has just published a list of Merchant Mariners in service for the year 1915 at http://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/#home. I counted 135 records for all five of our main study names. Some are Americans employed on British ships. Most have a name, an age and a place of birth. Do you fancy taking on this list and trying to identify the people, either a person already in our database or a new person, in which case it would be nice to know their parents and so on. 1915 is an interesting year, since many people would have enlisted directly into the armed forces and would almost certainly have appeared in 1910 (US) or 1911 (UK/Canada). Many will appear in online crew lists too, perhaps confirming other information about them.

Interested? Work at your own pace. There's no pressure at all. Write to me at paul@howesfamilies.com.

Constance Millicent Howse
Does anyone reading this note recognize this woman or know her family? A correspondent got in touch with me this month saying that 30 years ago, her mother helped to clear a house in Bromley, Kent. Nobody wanted the family photographs. So her mother took them. Now the mother has died and our correspondent has been through the photographs and noticed that one of them had 1913, Constance Millicent House (sic) age 6, written on the reverse. This photo is among those awaiting placing on our website, but there are others too, awaiting reunification with the relevant family. Please let me know if you can make a connection to this family.

Walter Robert Howes, son of John Clarke Howes
In the opposite vein, we've had a request from a new correspondent for any pictures of either of these two people or their relatives. Is anyone connected to them? Our correspondent's mother was separated from her family and thus she has no information about this particular line. Can you help? We would, of course, like to have copies of those photographs for our site!

Actually that goes for any of your Howes/House/Howse/Hows/Howze relations!

Useful, and free, piece of software
In the past few days I've had occasion to want to join some pdf files together and to want to convert pdf files to text. I found a piece of free software on the web which really helped me. It's at smallpdf.com. It also allows file conversion to and from spreadsheet, presentation and image (jpg) formats.

You have to upload your document, run the transformation you want and then download it. Simples! And your file is deleted from their system within 15 minutes. I will be using it again. My one piece of advice is: do not click on the annoying pop-up advertisements that appear when you first load the website!

Thanks again, everyone
Paul
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