Howes your father? - October 2016

Monthly updates
Post Reply
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Howes your father? - October 2016

Post by mardler »

Hello and happy new month, everyone. As an Italian colleague of mine once said, "You know it's the enda the month becaus'a the name change!"

Howes in the News
It's been a relatively quiet month, news-wise, for our clan this month. There was one notable item: a Gregory Howes, who seems to be a very bright young man! He is a professor at the University of Iowa and has just won the inaugural Ronald C Davidson award for plasma physics. If you would like to read more about his field of research, check out this award citation: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases ... 102516.php. I've found an email for Professor Howes and have written to him. So hopefully we'll be able to add him into our database soon.

So with it being a quiet month I thought I would write about two longer-term issues:

1 - recent hatches, matches and despatches
Our database contains only 2 births from this year, 4 for 2015 and 3 for 2014.
It contains only two marriages for 2015 and one for 2014, and none at all for this year.
We do have 27 deaths in 2016, mainly because of submissions from other members of the Guild of One-Name Studies who see obituaries in their local newspapers and send them to me, and other obituaries that I find time to deal with from my online notifications.

So, my questions are two-fold:
- have there been any recent births, marriages and deaths in your family, please? If so, could you let me know? Remember that we promise to keep confidential any records for anyone born within the last 100 years whom we do not know to have died.
- could you keep your eyes and ears open for other Howes news and drop me a line if you see anything?
Thanks in advance for your help

2 - DNA testing
I want to let you know of a few developments and some of our thinking on the subject. Sad to report that some years ago, Ancestry.com rather left us in the lurch, abandoning their DNA testing for male lineages. We've had to rebuild, at FamilyTreeDNA, but now have all Howes/House/Howse and similar names in one single project at FamilyTreeDNA, with 180 particpants already. We've included the name Howe, although we still have to find a single positive link between the singular-sounding name and our plural-sounding names.

You may recall my saying earlier in the year that we now have Brian Howes on our team who has volunteered to help with matters DNA. Brian and I have redesigned our DNA study page on the website here: http://howesfamilies.com/histories/dnastudy.php.

We can provide DNA test kits very cheaply, through the Guild of One-Name Studies as explained on that page. For anyone who wants complete confidentiality we can arrange it. Just ask.

If you live outside the UK, you may have noticed the value of the Pound Sterling decrease recently, following the Brexit vote earlier in the year. It's just a guess on my part but I think this may be a ridiculously good time to buy a DNA test priced in Pounds! It's also a good time to plan a visit to "the old country" but that's another topic!

If you have an older male House/Howes/Howse/Hows/Howze relative, now is a good time to talk with them about depositing their DNA into our knowledge bank so that the information can be used by future generations. It's a simple test, requiring only a cheek swab.

And here is a special plea: do you have Howes ancestors from Brandon Parva or Besthorpe in Norfolk, England and have a male Howes whom might be persuaded to take a test? Based upon my reading from some wills in the 1500s and 1600s, I have a strong feeling that these two families are actually related. If we could find two or three males from each line to test, we would know for sure whether that is true. At this point we'd be happy with just one, although three or four hundred years gives quite a lot of scope for the occasional "non-paternal event"!

And finally, the Howes Family Association from North America is still looking for the ancestral home of Thomas Howes who arrived in Massachusetts in 1636. Maybe we will happen across a match!

For the record
We finished October having added about 850 people this month ending at over 113,600. The number of source references to the England and Wales birth index now exceeds 100,000 and the number of references to the 1841 census now exceeds 10,000! The past month also saw two family additions where we were able to bring together not just two but three different "family groups" together, as we found a new oldest ancestor for them. The past month or so has seen us make great progress in Gloucestershire and Norfolk in the UK and Michigan in the US. If your family hails from those areas, take a gander and if you can add to (or even correct!) what we have found, please do get in touch.

I'm pleased to say too that we also deleted about 100 or so people for whom we had very little details other than a name and whose relationship to our clan was too distant for them to be important. We had taken this information when we had started out and were interested in adding numbers rather than quality. We are deleting this material in preparation for uploading our material to FamilySearch's Guild of One-Name Studies collection, which I've mentioned before. It will take at least a year to prepare the rest of the file for FamilySearch, however!

Thank you for your continued support
derek howes
Posts: 2
Joined: June 2nd, 2010, 10:35 am

Re: Howes your father? - October 2016

Post by derek howes »

Hi Paul,
Thank you for another interesting Howes newsletter.
When we were last in the U.K. We visited the Wookey Hole near Cheddar and to our surprise we saw The Sid Howes Circus there! Do you know the history of this circus? I may be wrong with the Christian name of Sid but Howes was correct.
I look forward to hearing from you or a Howes members who know the circus.
Kind regards,
Derek Howes
In South Africa
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Re: Howes your father? - October 2016

Post by mardler »

Hello Derek. Interesting question. The Howes name has long been associated with the circus business on both sides of the Atlantic. See the records for Seth Benedict Howes and his close relations who brought their equestrian act from the US to London back in the 1850s.

The only Sidney Howes whom I can find who might even come close to fitting what you discovered is this gentleman:
http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename

You can see from the notes that he had a son (now dead) and grandchildren and perhaps it is one of them. I couldn't find the descendants from prior searches. I suppose being in the circus business made one an itinerant and thus difficult to track down but I'll take a look again and see what I can find. If not much, I'll ask in next month's newsletter to see whether anyone lives near Wookey and can go check it out for us.
Kind regards
Paul
Post Reply