Putting our Howze in order - May 2019

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

Putting our Howze in order - May 2019

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Hello everyone. Happy new month. In May we added over 700 people and finished with 145,731 people in our database and fleshed out quite a few other families. Our research has taken us to all four corners of the world. I do have to say that our enthusiasm for this task is undimmed: it's still fun! This issue is going to be a bit rushed because I'm taking my yacht, Melinda, into a 24-hour race tomorrow (see 3rr.uk, if you are interested) and I still have to do quite a bit of preparation. Here's a gratuitous picture of Melinda in full flight with her modern rig.
The good ship, Melinda
The good ship, Melinda
Melinda2019.jpg (68.65 KiB) Viewed 2488 times
Puzzle Corner
Here's a good one. We bought a marriage certificate to try to figure out who the couple were. It did help, but only a little! William Howes, who married Elizabeth Skelton in 1876, was the son of another William Howes, who was a Sawyer. You can see the marriage certificate by clicking on the image here:
https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename
The problem is that there are two people named William Howes of roughly the right age who lived in London with fathers named William who were sawyers! Their IDs are i19253 and i148639. To see their records, go to Advanced Search at top left of most pages on the site, type the ID into the relevant box and hit the enter key. Can you figure out which family Elizabeth's husband belongs to? Can you find the right couple after their marriage?

RootsTech London
Remember, I will be speaking about this study at the show. As if I weren't attraction enough for you to attend, Rootstech announced yesterday that Donny Osmond will be one of their daily keynote speakers. Donny comes from a large Mormon family in Utah, and has quite a few children himself. Family is very important to people of the Mormon faith and Donny exemplifies it well. If his talk is anything like the one he gave in Salt Lake City in 2015 I am sure you will enjoy it. Yes, he will sing and unlike many stars of his generation his voice is still just as good as it was.
https://www.rootstech.org/london

Check your spam folder
I'm a pretty heavy user of computing, especially my laptop, as you might imagine. I use mostly free email accounts and I kind of get used to their foibles. Both Gmail and Hotmail are free services and their owners do their best to save us from the tyranny of junk mail and do a pretty good job. However, being free, their owners try to reduce the number of duplicate emails, to save space on their servers and reduce the size of our personal accounts. Sometimes that means that virtuous emails don't get through at all and sometimes they drop into our "spam" folders.

Yesterday, I registered on a new website and was told to check my email and click on the email from them. It didn't arrive, presumably jammed in Mr Google's filters. So I checked my spam folder, just in case. It wasn't there either but I found close to 20 emails relevant to this study in there, mostly helpful comments sent in by participants but some registration emails too. Google told me that I had told it that all email from howesfamilies.com should be treated as spam. Er, no. I didn't! So I'm just going to suggest that you check your spam or junk mail folders every few weeks just in case you find something valuable in there.

Legacy
In last month's note I mentioned that I had received a legacy. After I arrived back in England two weeks ago, I went to pick it up, a 250-mile round trip. There were three boxes, now condensed down to two, as pictured in the accompanying email.

First, I want to thank Peter David Bretherton Howse posthumously for compiling all that material and remembering this study in his will. I never knew the man and I do not believe we ever swapped notes, but he had obviously heard of us. He was single, and although he had cousins, none of them is named Howse. I don't even know what he did for a living. He and his parents lived in Mill Hill in North West London and after he retired, he moved to Sleaford in Lincolnshire. Going back in time, his family hailed from Leicestershire and Birmingham, and before that from Oxfordshire.

As for his research, I've started with the key folder, a file containing about 100 family group sheets all written up long-hand in pencil, with extensive notes. I've gone through about 2/3rds of them so far and made amendments to our files. I did spot about 30 certificates for people named Howse and have transcribed all of them. His research so far has exactly paralleled ours, which is a relief! While we are human and we do make mistakes, it's confidence-building to see that we have done a good job. Mr Howse

In my picture, the research itself is in the left hand box, while the right hand box contains ALL of his correspondence, printed out, with incoming notes and replies. Some of it goes back 30 years and more. Who among us is half as diligent these days?!

What excites me the most, is finding an entire ring binder, almost an inch thick, containing transcriptions of wills from Oxfordshire. It's going to be quite a job to go through all of those, but based on work we've done elsewhere I'm expecting to find material that will confirm early familial relationships and enable us to go back with confidence. I just do not know how long it will take.

Thank you, Mr Howse.

D-Day
It just occurred to me that next week is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied Force landings on the beaches of Normandy, which led to the end of World War Two, in just over a year. A quick check of our database reveals that one of our number, Peter Thomas Howes-Dufton from London, died in the day itself in Normandy. Another man in our database, James Abner Cecil Lindsey from Alabama, died there just three days later. So let us remember in the next few days them and their comrades who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.


Before I close, with 1,400 correspondents, it's inevitable that some of them will die each year. I did not expect that I would learn of three deaths within a week. My sympathies to the families of those concerned and thanks to them for letting us know.
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