Going round the HOWSEs - June 2018

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

Going round the HOWSEs - June 2018

Post by mardler »

Happy new month, everyone.

Progress report
As it's month end, I've just run our weekly website update a day early. During June, we added another 850 or so people and there's a good chance next month we will have over 135,000 people in our database. We've added a lot of American people named Howse and House this month, having received two reasonably large files from correspondents.
Given the lovely weather here in the past couple of weeks I've taken well over 1,000 Norfolk gravestone images for other members of the Guild and retained about 20 of them because they were for people named Howes! Our own gravestone picture collection now numbers 400, just a small fraction of what's possible. Do you have any?

Major puzzle
I think it was a Guild member who drew my attention to this item on sale at a British Auction house: https://www.dnw.co.uk/auctions/catalogu ... t_id=15862.

Basically, it's the set of medals and a couple of dogtags pictured here:
ArthurSouthamHowesMedals.JPG
ArthurSouthamHowesMedals.JPG (68.5 KiB) Viewed 2243 times
They belonged to an Arthur Southam Howes who attested for service as a Driver with the British forces in 1940. Per the description he had been born on 12 June 1912, but he is a total mystery to me so far! The ONLY thing I can find on him is an entry in the 1959 London Gazette where it says that he had been known as Arthur Townsend Southam and was changing his name by Deed Poll to Arthur Southam Howes.

However, I can't find a birth, marriage or death record for him under any of the names or combination thereof! Neither can I find a likely man named Arthur with the correct date of birth in the 1939 Register. IIt's quite possible that he was born somewhere outside of England and went there to enlist, but I cannot see anything obvious. So I'm stuck and need inspiration. Can you help, please? Put your thinking caps on!

"Aussie Royalty"
I want to acknowledge, with a huge vote of thanks, the help of correspondent Cheryl Ianson who rewrote our page on Howes, House & Howse convicts transported to Australia and has produced a large number of notes for me on various individuals. You can see the new page and extended list of 52 transportees here: http://howesfamilies.com/histories/tazzy.php.
I still have quite a few of Cheryl's notes to work through. However, if you have Howes/etc convict in your ancestry and either can't find the person listed or can find them but not a link to our database, please do drop me a line.

From our news feed
News on folks with our name has been rather thin this month, apart from minor sports teams finishing their seasons. However, there was one real gem: two brothers named Howes from South Africa who went all the way to the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic island to go kite-boarding. If you click on this link,
https://www.surfertoday.com/kiteboardin ... ating-lake
you will find the story and a five minute video showing their remarkable adventure. Kite surfing off a beach is dangerous enough but these guys . . . well, see for yourself! And, if you can put Graham into a family for us, do let me know.

That's all, folks.
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