Man about the Howes - February 2021

Post Reply
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Man about the Howes - February 2021

Post by mardler »

Happy new month, everyone. I'm not exactly sure when this is going to be sent, as I sent an email only 7 days ago, as you probably know. I may be delayed until tomorrow. We will see.

Progress this month
Because my laptop went South on me, it took a week before I could raise a technician to come out and take a look at the old kit. I stayed awake overnight trying to save files from my old hard drive, unfortunately without success. Then it took another week to recover what I could from the wreckage of thumb drives, and of course, my cloud storage. Then I bought a brand-new laptop because I had no confidence in the old machine any more. Since then I've been almost full time catching up. I still have about 50 emails in my inbox that have piled up. I've been "pecking" at the ones which seem simple

Despite all of that we have been able to add about 900 people to our file this month. I'm shocked at how much we HAVE been able to do. we now have 181044 people in reconstructed families in our master file. To anyone paying attention, I've managed to restart work on transcribing the book "Howes Genealogy" and am now at page 331. It's more than it seems, since the index of names runs over 110 pages!

Don't be me
I had thought that my back up systems were perfect. They weren't. Fortunately, for the absolutely crucial files containing our 13 years of work, we had plenty of backups, as we did for our master marriage file. However, a bunch of smaller files, created or received within the last two years "went poof." I feel good and bad. Good that I didn't lose more but bad that I did lose some files. The better news is that my email is all in the cloud. So anything sent to me via that should be OK and anything given to me on a disk (Yes, Richard) should still be OK also. A few presentations I have given will need to be rewritten, but fortunately not too many as I had shared some via email.
Please, please make sure that whatever back up arrangements you think you have working ARE actually working. Do not lose your work.

MyHeritage
The folks at MyHeritage are very active at marketing and it turns out now that they have extended the opportunity to transfer your Ancestry, 23 and Me, etc DNA test results to them until March 7.

They're also active at developing new products too. Their latest offering is to turn your still photographs into mini-movies! The process is called Deep Nostalgia. It's quite intriguing how they though I'm personally not yet convinced it's a good idea! To see some examples, click on this link:
https://blog.myheritage.com/2021/02/dee ... e=hs_email

RootsTech
Hope those of us who did sign up saw some good material at RootsTech. Turns out over ONE MILLION people signed up, making this the largest genealogy fair of all time by a margin of about 30times! All the presentations will remain online for the next year. And if you didn't sign up already, it's not too late. Just go to RootsTech.org.

What a hoot!
Susan Howes in Hampshire in England has a nesting box, usually occupied by a pair of owls. She put a video camera in the box to see how the birds are doing at parenting. This year there was an attempted usurpation. Check out what happened here.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... d-box.html
Please do note that I am not responsible for the Daily Mail's "click bait" down the right hand side of every page on their site. It works for them, though not for me!

Was your ancestor a smuggler?
We know there are several purveyors of contraband in our files, and several members of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise whose job it was to catch them! Many years ago I wrote about a boat used for smuggling in Kent where the Customs men never figured out that the boat's mast was hollow and stuffed full of brandy on every trip! In Norwich is one of the older public houses in the UK, called the Adam and Eve. The owner, one Elizabeth Howes, nee Thurling, owned a wherry, a large single-sailed craft used for trading on the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. It was rumoured that said Elizabeth used to smuggle by hiding goods in the sand used for ballast in the bottom of her boat. I've recently been contacted by a descendant of hers who is interested in writing up the stories. If you are also a descendant and have anything to offer, or would just like to be put in touch with him, do let me know.

Calling our Brisbane readers . . . .
When I'm not golfing or sailing, I do like an adult beverage, I will admit! There is a brewery in Brisbane owned by a Howes family, one of whom was on a podcast last week. The company is called Newstead Brewing. Their website is https://newsteadbrewing.com.au/. Is there an intrepid researcher among us who would like to sample their wares and report back? I'd be interested to learn more, for sure. Maybe if you go, you can ask the owner, Peter Howes, for a detail or two about his parentage. I'm curious to learn how he fits in! In the podcast, he says he is a fourth generation Queenslander, but that's all I know. Here's the podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/p ... 0510288734

That's all folks!
Paul
Post Reply