Putting our Hows in order - April 2019

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

Putting our Hows in order - April 2019

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Happy new month, everyone. Wow! We are 1/3 of the way through 2019. The older I get the faster time seems to go by . . . . or am I just wasting too much time on Facebook? Maybe it's both! This month we added 750 people to our database and ended up with just over 145,000. Will we get to 150,000 by RootsTech in London? Not sure at this point.

Puzzle corner
Having telegraphed that we have some puzzles and not done much with them the past couple of months, I'm going to start this newsletter with one I've had hanging around for a couple of years now, especially apt since our title rotation has reached the surname HOWS. I looked at it again today and I'm still stumped by it.
OK. Let's take a look at the record of Arthur Dyke Hart Hows, here: https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename.
Don't look too hard at the detail to begin with. Just note the fact that he has two sets of parents: one adoptive, the Peasnells and one natural: Arthur and Annie Hows.
We know a fair bit about the Peasnells, and even if they didn't adopt ADHH immediately, they clearly had that intention in 1901, having moved the young boy from Bristol to Towcester, in the centre of England. They were a classic English family "of the middling sort".
However, the only things we know about ADHH's birth parents are from his birth certificate, which you can see by clicking on the tiny image. His father was a commercial traveller. Mother, annoyingly named Annie Smith, lived in Clifton, in Bristol. This is the puzzle: can you figure out more about either or both of them? Were they married? Where were they from? What happened to them? Why did they part with young ADHH?

News about our Study - something about people named Howse?
Many thanks to correspondent Richard Howse for his very kind donation to our (empty) certificate buying fund. I will match your donation as I normally do, and will be careful how I spend it!

I was very intrigued last week to receive an email from a firm of British solicitors. These days, with so much fraud and identity theft via the internet I was initially quite cautious, but it turns out that they were "on the level". We have been left a legacy by a man named Howse and I will have to go to Spalding in Lincolnshire to pick it up during May. It appears that it is a filing cabinet containing his own research. I've no idea yet how big it is or what it contains. I will say more next month once I've had a chance to go through the material.

Howes Leather
For over 200 years, every male in my direct Howes line has made shoes, until me. My dad worked for a company called Start-Rite, famous for its children's shoes. He even went to Buckingham Palace to measure Prince Charles's and Princess Anne's feet for their shows. Anyway, I still have a loose interest in that business. While I was in Salt Lake City recently, I came across an old newspaper article referring to the company called Howes Leather which operated in Boston in 1800s/1900s. Do we have a descendant of that family reading this article? Please get in touch. I would like to learn more and do some kind of feature on them. According to the North China Herald (a Shanghai newspaper), in 1916 Howes Brothers was the largest processor of leather in the world, with a capacity of 2 million pounds, that's 1,000 tons, of leather PER WEEK!

Fire-starter
Oh, and while we are on the subject of Massachusetts businesses, a correspondent wrote to me this month asking me if I knew anything about Mayflower fire starters. She had recently bought one and seeing a Mayflower logo on the top, wondered if there was a Howes connection. A little internet searching later, I found this: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... 1781360722. You can see that these fire-starters were indeed made by a company called S M Howes. Is there a descendant of that family among us? More generally, although I have seen such things before I have never used one. Is there anyone out there reading this who has?

Howes in the news
-- Matt Howes of Rockford, Illinois was honored for his bravery in rescuing a woman from a burning car and then going back for her son. See:
https://wrex.com/category/2019/04/11/ro ... ing-lives/

- Californian dirt-bike rider, Skyler Howes, won the 2019 Morocco Desert Classic, racing across the North African desert. There are some good pictures of him in the article where I found the news originally https://blog.motorcycle.com/2019/04/25/ ... challenge/. But, if you are of an adventurous mind, take a gander at this video on the front page of his website!
http://www.skylerhowes110.com/

- Astronomer Nick Howes from the UK believes he has found the missing lunar module which was jettisoned from the Apollo 10 mission fifty years ago this year. We've all heard of looking for a needle in a haystack . . . Read more about it here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -back.html - sorry about all the adverts!

- And to close, here is some sadder news with a Howes connection. Regular readers of this newsletter will recall Seth Benedict Howes, the circus entrepreneur who then invested his money in Chicago real estate in the late 1800s and made a bigger fortune! His British-born wife was a very religious person who left a fabulous legacy to York Minster in England in the 1920s when she died. Anyway, Seth and his wife built a church on their estate in Putnam County just North of New York City. As you can see from the picture, although it is recognizably American it was modeled after traditional English village churches. Sadly, the church has just held its final service. The article linked here (http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2019/ ... Apr19.html) gives a lot of the history of the church and is well worth reading. I'm not sure whether the church is open but if there is a reader among us who lives close by and would be prepared to visit and take a few photographs for us we'd be very grateful.

All the best
Paul
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