Going round the HOWESes - July 2017 - late issue

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

Going round the HOWESes - July 2017 - late issue

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Hello folks. You may have wondered why our monthly newsletter was delayed this month. My laptop has been out of order for over a week, spending a few days in laptop hospital. It came back to me last evening minus half its brain which I will have to replace. Crossing my fingers as I say this, but all our data is intact - the hard drive still works. It was mostly backed up, but we might have lost a week's work.

Writing this between regattas, this will be a very short update. First and most important, I want to say a huge THANK YOU to the five people who came forward with a total of £300 to help our certificate-buying programme. I matched the first £200 pound-for-pound and bought 42 certificates and I will put in another £100 to match the fifth donation which came in after my order. If you too would like to contribute, please do let me know.

The certificates have provided answers to many questions:
- in three cases the parties had been previously divorced
- in others thanks to finding information on the parties' parents we have been able to identify which particular Howes/House/etc man with a common name (like William) happened to marry a particular woman
- in another two or three cases the Howes/etc party had switched their given names at marriage - they're not as easy to spot after 1911 in England and Wales where only one given name and an initial are recorded.

The rest of our news this month turns out to have a military and centenarian flavour.

Pioneering American Lieutenant Colonel turns out to have been a Brit
Nora Howes of the suburban community of Brick in New Jersey turned 100 last month and can now see her own online record! We saw an article referencing her here: http://www.app.com/story/news/military/ ... 441056001/. She was a pioneering officer in the US Womens Army Corps and her story would have been interesting enough to mention here. What was curious was that she wasn't in our database and as we researched her we found that she herself was born in the Manchester area of England, immigrating to the US with her parents at the age of seven. The article mentions her British parents but had not mentioned that she herself was a Brit!

Private John F Howes dies at 102
John Howes of Gorleston in Norfolk died in July. We have written about him before in 2014 when he reached 100 years old. He was a Japanese prisoner of war having been captured in the fall of Singapore in 1943. You had to be made of "stern stuff" to have survived the camps these men wre imprisoned and John's longevity is testament to that. Read the latest article about him at: http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/gorleston-f ... -1-5101224

That's almost it for this month, folks, except to note that we finished the month at 123,227 people in our database and to ask whether anyone knows the identity of the family in this photograph, which was taken on a beach somewhere(!) and provided to us by Owen Howes. Who were they? Where was it?
Howes on the Beach.jpg
Howes on the Beach.jpg (37.09 KiB) Viewed 1728 times
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