Putting our Howze in order - August 2020

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

Putting our Howze in order - August 2020

Post by mardler »

Hi folks. Happy new month.

Couple of milestones passed this month
As you will have seen from the covering email, we have passed 40,000 people named Howes in our database. That's people named Howes at birth. It does not include those who became Howes by marriage. Honestly, I don't know how many there might be in total, but I am pretty sure we must be well on the downslope now.

Some years ago, a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies made some very rough calculations and estimated that the total number of nameholders could be estimated by multiplying the number of nameholders in the British 1881 census by 7. Let's assume that the number is now 8, That means that the total number of HOWESes is about 42,000.

Problem is that that number refers only to Howes people in the UK.

So, let's look at the Howes population in the US. By far the largest American family , , , and I mean "by far" . . . is that of Thomas Howes and Mary Burr who settled on Ca[e Cod in 1637. We have added quite a few people from that family into our database in the past month. We are now up to page 306 in the book, "Howes Genealogy" by Colonel Bob Howes, well into the tenth generation and well over half-way through the book, thanks to the generous permission given to us by the Dennis Historical Society to use the contents of the book for our database. The number of source references to that book in our database passed 20,000 during the month.

Of course, I'm not including people in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and many other countries across the world, even including Argentina and China, but relative to the UK and US, with all due respect, these are small numbers.
Hence I conclude that we are over half-way done with the Howes name.

I wish I could be as confident about the HOUSE name! We have the UK portion covered at least as well as the Howes name, but it's obvious we have a LOT of work to do. In case you haven't been reading my mails for long, let me explain that the House family name in the US grew from two sources, not just from England but also from Germany, where many people were named HAUS originally. (Haus is German for House). I've noticed that I'm increasingly spending my time on US House families. Just one obituary received last month led to a family of 350 people before I ran out of obvious links to prior generations! There are many such! Are we daunted? Not at all!

Some oddball statistics
As our database grows, I think it becomes more and more potentially useful to social historians.

I thought it would be amusing to find our how many times a Howes man married a Howes woman. So I ran a little search using the Advanced Search facility on our website. Want to guess how many? I was shocked. If I add in the HOUSEx2, HOWSEx2 and HOWZEx2 marriages, I came to 358! The Howes ones can mostly be explained by the large number of Howes people in small areas on Cape Cod and Norfolk, England. The number of the others was very surprising!

There are no fewer than 20 references to some version of the words bigamy or bigamist in the database.

There are 44 instances of the words "polite fiction" in our database! We use this phrase to indicate where a father has simply been invented on a marriage certificate by at least one of the parties to save face and protect themselves and other relatives from the embarrassment of illegitimacy. I have no doubt at all that we are missing others!

We have 169 instances of the phrase "cousins marry". Hmm....thinking about that one, I'm not quite sure why we have an odd number! Similarly, we have 117 instances of "two brothers marry two sisters". Again, why the odd number?!

Thank you
We received many contributions from other researchers this month and I just want to acknowledge particularly the help of:
- Mary Roberts, who sent in over 40 certificates for her House family and quite a few photographs, which we are adding to our online collection
- Janet Hilliker, the Norwich Archivist, who shared details from four different House/Howes families in her area. Now, the smart ones among you will already be asking "Norwich Archivist?" There's the Norfolk Record Office, we know, but does Norwich have an archivist? Well, yes, it does, but it's not the Norwich you expected. Janet is from Norwich in Oxford County, Ontario! It's an area that received immigrants from all over; there's even one family who moved there from Cape Cod!

RootsTech 2021
I'm pleased to have been asked to be an Ambassador for RootsTech again next year. I really wish I could share some important information with everyone but it's embargoed until tomorrow night. Let's just say that if I have understood well, pretty much everyone will be able to attend . . . . So, keep your eyes open over the next couple of days for news on RootsTech 2021.

And finally, a plea
I took on a little private genealogy work this month to generate some funds so that we can buy some more certificates to answer more questions and join more family branches up together. So, please, if you have any funds you are able to share for this purpose, I am prepared to match your contributions, up to a maximum of £1,000. Please drop me a line to paul (at) howesfamilies.com and we can figure out how best to transfer any funds. We are pretty frugal with our funds, honest. We once had a donation of £500, I matched it and it lasted for nearly two years.

Late edit
Ooops. I forgot to add that we added 1,800 people this month and finished with 174,121 people in our master file!
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