Going round the HOWSEs - March 2017

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

Going round the HOWSEs - March 2017

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. March was a momentous month for us as we passed 120,000 people in our database, almost all of them in reconstructed trees, having added close to 2,000 people during the month. Most of the 2,000 were from a large House family from Virginia in the US most of which migrated West to Ohio and Indiana. They were the fruits of a book which I found online in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. I was running short of time while I was there. So I took pictures of all the pages I couldn't transcribe on my cell phone and have been transcribing them as I had time. I still have a few more pages to do.

Anyway, our efforts are way more than one person and over way more than just one month! Thanks are due to:
- my co-researchers, Ian and Mike Howes, who have been working with us now for most of our nine years,
- to Dave Howes in Germany who helped us with our initial index construction
- to Judith and Chris Jordan who have been gradually working through the Commonwealth War Graves website identifying the men and women listed their who gave their lives during conflict
- to Mike Twinn in Spain who manages the images on our site
- to Brian Howes who has come on board to help us with the Howe/House/Howes DNA project
- to many, many other correspondents (most of you!) who have shared their data with us and/or sent in the occasional correction. That includes the 71 members of the Guild of One-Name Studies who have directly helped with data and numerous other members who have looked up marriage details for us through the Guild's "marriage challenge" programme.

Vietnam War memorial
At the North Florida Genealogy conference at which I was speaking earlier in the month, there was a booth concerning Vietnam War Veterans. Many people will know about the striking Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC. More than 58,000 names are commemorated there, including four men named Howes, two named Howze and ten named House.

What you may not know is that there is also an effort under way to create a virtual Wall of Faces by collecting multiple photographs of those who gave their lives in the conflict. See: http://www.vvmf.org/about-the-wall-of-faces.

There are 7,383 people currently left with no photograph, including one man named Douglas Arthur House, born 1947 in Cedar Grove, Carroll County, Tennessee. Does anyone know this man's family and have a picture?

If you have a Vietnam death in your family, to see whether there is a missing photo, go to http://www.vvmf.org/wall-of-faces/, click on "Advanced search", type your surname, click the box at the bottom which says "Does not have a photo" and hit Search. There is also a good generalized search facility on the home page of the site where you can learn more about any of the 58,000.

British marriage locator
I mentioned the Guild of One-Name Studies above. The Guild has well over 1 million marriages in its database which members have shared with one another. One benefit of our having done that the data for English and Welsh marriages after 1837 can be used to predict where a marriage took place without having to buy the certificate. I will not go into detail but, simply, within each registration each quarter the volume and page numbers for each marriage are in alphabetical order by village and church name.

To see an example, go to http://www.marriage-locator.co.uk/, in the boxes type in
Year: 1875
Quarter: 4
Volume: 1c
Page: 798
Hit the search button and you will see that the search result is "St Thomas, Bethnal Green". Sometimes the program can't tell you the exact location but can tell you that alphabetically, it's between place A and place B.

As you can appreciate, the more data the Guild has, the more accurate the marriage locator website is. At Howesfamilies.com, we have shared all 6,800 marriages where we know the place where the marriage occurred and another 20,000 marriages both in England/Wales and worldwide. If you know the location of an EnglandWales House/Howes marriage and all we have in our database is the quarter and the district, please would you let us know? Scans or photos of certificates would be great, but they're not completely necessary. Thanks in advance.

Lewis Howes, sportsman, entrepreneur
Lewis Howes is a descendant of Thomas Howes and Mary Burr, who arrived in the US about the year 1636. I met him once in London about 6 years ago. He had contacted me through the website and was visiting London, where I was working at the time. He was writing a book about how to leverage LinkedIn. Boy, did he succeed! He's now living his dream and good for him. Somehow I missed this article about him in Forbes Magazine a couple of years ago. . . .! https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmajohnso ... 00796c1bfe
Well worth a read. His brother, by the way, is Christian Howes, the world-renowned jazz violinist.

That's all this month, folks. I'm off to the annual conference of the Guild this weekend and then to WhoDoYouThinkYouAre?Live next weekend in Birmingham, England. All the best
Paul
Post Reply