Going round the HOWESes - October 2018

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

Going round the HOWESes - October 2018

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. Happy new month. Less than two more to Christmas, I'm afraid!

Maps not working - it's temporary, I hope
Here at HowesFamilies.com we had a rather bad present from Google last month. Ever since we went live, we've been using GoogleMaps to illustrate the various paths in life taken by our ancestors. Almost every person has a map toward the bottom of their record. The service was free, but in its wisdom Google has determined that large users of this service must pay. HowesFamilies serves up nearly 20,000 page views per month and I'm not about to leave an open credit card for Google to draw on. So, we are looking at an open-source solution, which will be free to use. To make that work, we had to upgrade our core software, now done. For the moment, the maps aren't working, but I expect them to be back within a few days.

How global are we?
The Guild of One-Name Studies has recently started a new index, of marriages around the world before 1940. The Howes One-Name Study was an early seeder of the database. I put together the list of almost 23,000 marriages. They had to be before 1940, to exclude living people, with both place and date known. I then did a little analysis on the results. Here's what I found regarding the country where the marriages took place:
Global marriage locations
Global marriage locations
Pre1940 marriage locations.JPG (60.52 KiB) Viewed 2313 times
I found it fascinating how many countries around the world have had a Howes marriage, beyond the traditional English-speaking areas. I'm sure too that there are more to find. Did one of your relatives marry somewhere unusual? Are they in our file yet?

By the way, if you are looking for a particular, relatively unusual surname, try going to the Guild's site at http://www.one-name.org and typing your surname of interest in the search box. You may find some people with that name and be able to find a marriage at the right time in the right place. If you do, you will also find a handy button to communicate with the Guild member who submitted that marriage and learn more. Perhaps you can help them too.

Individuals with our name in the news
There were two items of news over the past month, concerning people we had already featured here:
- remember Logan Howes, the young go-karter who was seeking a sponsor? He found one!
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/bunwell-go- ... -1-5705444
- remember Alice Howes the British New Jersey resident, a pioneer for women in the US armed forces? We featured her on her 100th birthday, noting that her brother had also reached three figures a few years before. Sad to say, she passed on recently.

A snowed in marriage
I attended a family marriage in England last weekend. It was cold and very wet, but very emotional, just as a good wedding should be. With winter approaching let's just imagine how romantic it must be for a family wedding in crisp white countryside in Northern England after a good snowstorm. But what if the snowdrifts were 16feet deep in places and neither the groom nor even the officiating minister could get there? What would be left to do but hole up in the church and wait? That is exactly what happened in 1895 in a small village in Cumberland. It took 200 men to clear the road to allow the groom and vicar to attend the following day! The incident made all the national newspapers and we're re-typed a piece from Edinburgh which describes it well. You can read it, and see pictures of the bridal party, bride and groom, and the cleared road at https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename. Our thanks to correspondent Kerry Robinson for bringing this story to our attention and providing the pictures from the family album.

On offer, 160+year old letter
Is there anyone out there related to or, better, descended from Henry Howes or Howse born 1832 in Latton in WIltshire? https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename Henry served in the Crimean War winning the campaign medal and all four clasps for each of the main battles. What's even more important to us is that he wrote home to his parents describing his experiences. A correspondent in Canada descended from Henry's brother has that letter and is anxious that it find a good home with one of his family. Henry had no fewer than 17 children. So there is a good chance that there is someone alive from that line. If you are a descendant, please write to me showing me your relationship and I will put you in touch.
I have, by the way, transcribed the letter and will feature it on our site soon. I found it very interesting and hope you will too.

Progress this month
As to our progress, we have added almost 900 more people in October and finished at 138,158 people. I'm hoping to reach 140,000 people shortly after the new year. We now have over 1,400 correspondents, most of whom receive this mail. We've had quite a bit of correspondence with other members of the Guild this month and now have 192 other One-Name Studies as sources for our study. It's looking increasingly likely that I will achieve the goal I set of having 200 such by year end. With our certificate fund, I bought nearly 40 certificates and will be putting those online over the next few weeks, though I have already used the information on them to connect families.
During October too, I completed a "marriage challenge" for other Guild members. Basically, what that means is that I took the Registration District of Flegg in North -East Norfolk and looked up church marriages for other Guild members who asked me. During the course of that, I identified over 40 Howes marriages from 1837 up to about 1980 and have connected all the families for those marriages. If you have family from that area, you may find extra information on them online.

Finally, please note that I may well be sending out an extra note in a week or so to talk about RootsTech next February.
All the best
Paul
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