Going round the HOWSEs - January 2018

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

Going round the HOWSEs - January 2018

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Happy new month, everyone. From our inside-out perspective here are howesfamilies.com HQ, we had a bumper month this month, adding new fewer than 1,600 people to our database in January, finishing a few dozen people short of 130,000. Special thanks to our co-researchers. I’ve been rather busy with correspondence too, handling all kinds of queries and additional input from around the world and I am still way behind with some correspondence. I have not added any transcribed wills in the past month. It’s all to do with the close of year for the Guild of One-Name Studies. I feel busy enough that I am not going to RootsTech or the wonderful Family History Library in Salt Lake City, this year.

Guild matters
I know I keep returning to talk about the Guild in these monthly notes, but I really cannot say enough good things about the organization and the amazing collaborative spirit they have fostered over the nearly 40 years since their founding. During January, I had several notes from researchers having found obituaries in their local newspapers (and sent a few myself) and I had some gravestone pictures and other handy references from other members. I’ve also corresponded with a wide variety of other members on Howes/etc-issues where my study overlaps with theirs. If you look at this web-page, you will see the list of now 110 other One-Name Studies and their owners, who have been sources for our study.
http://howesfamilies.com/browsesources. ... arch=ne-na
I’ve been publicly saying now for about a year that it’s my goal to get that list up to 200 by the end of 2018. We are well on the way. I think we will make it.

Before I get to other matters, I should say too that I have been trying my best to produce a file to send to FamilySearch to act as a permanent store of our work and show it to an even wider audience. I haven’t yet found a way to reproduce the combination of software that we currently use to hide everyone born within the last 100 years whom we do not know to have died but I do expect to sort it within the next few weeks. As one wag pointed out to me in the last few weeks, given that you can’t keep up with all of your correspondence now, it’s probably a good thing that you haven’t done that until you are close to giving up being chairman of the Guild. I had to admit that they have a point!

Daily Google search
I have said in the past too that I have a daily search set up to find news of people named Howes, Howse, Hows and Howze. I wish there were a way to find people named House too, but you will appreciate that you get so much irrelevant material that it’s not worth it. Researchers for other names in general use (I have the surname Want in my own background, for example) will continue to have a torrid time of it until a proper metasearch appears allowing for searches on surnames only!

Anyway, a few interesting things have appeared in my feed this month:
1) late in the month, there was an article in a Washington State newspaper about the news 75 years ago. They quoted news of a Claude Howes, a shipyard worker who was taken prisoner by the Japanese on their capture of Wake Isaland in December 1941 and had recently died in a Prisoner of War camp. We are on the trail of Claude’s ancestry and will report next month.
2) remember Logan Howes, age 6, from Bunwell in Norfolk (my mother’s home village) who was seeking sponsorship for his go-karting efforts? Well, according to this article in the Diss Mercury, he has found a sponsor and is now eagerly in training.
http://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/young ... -1-5371840
Can we say “the next Lewis Hamilton”? Maybe the one after next . . .!
3) And now some news of great interest to those like me who enjoy their beer:
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/15906117 ... f_new_pub/
Is there anyone out there in the Lewes area of Sussex who might stop by and report back on the quality of the product?! Fortunately, thanks to the online database of company directors in the UK, I can see the names and dates of birth for the proprietor and his father. They are safely in our database!

A question for US readers
I’m very curious about how our name has developed in the US, and why people sometimes drop the S or misinterpret it. I have talked in the past about the Howes Brothers circus, for example, but even 100+ years ago, you can see posters for “Howe’s Bros” circus. And every few months I get emails from people named Howe asking to join our online study. I do tell them about our Howe/Howes/House DNA project, of course, but turn them away from our study into plural-sounding names. People just don’t seem to ‘get it’ that Howe and Howes are different surnames. I haven’t seen the same thing in the UK or Australia.

What brought this to mind was seeing a large monument in a graveyard in Frederick, Maryland in late December. It was clearly and boldly inscribed “DUVALL - HOWES” and obviously marked a family plot. I saw it from a distance and became very excited! However, when I saw the smaller stones marking individual graves, they were for a Charles Lawrence Howe and a Mary Elizabeth Howe, her maiden name being Duvall. I have checked online and the individual stones are correct.

So, the question is, “You don’t see SMITHS engraved on monuments for a Smith family plot or BROWNS or ROBINSONS, or any other plural. So why HOWES when the people are HOWEs?“ Can anyone explain?

Discounts available
If you have an interest in England and Wales Howes/House families, you may have read my comments about “uncertificates” (my word) here: http://howesfamilies.com/histories/feature10.php. The most recent news this month is that the GRO is extending the discount period for discounted £6 “uncertificates” until July 2018.

Lastly, if you are a male UK resident and are thinking about buying a yDNA test (we encourage all males with our name to take one!) the price has come down thanks to the strength of the UK Pound. We can offer tests at £90 each, through the Guild. Please do get in touch if you are interested. Ladies, sadly, you will need to find a male named Howes, House, etc to take this particular test. For more details, see: http://howesfamilies.com/histories/dnastudy.php

Paul
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