Man about the Hows - October 2021

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

Man about the Hows - October 2021

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Hello everyone and, finally, greetings from my home in Florida, where even the coolest days are warmer than the average day in my native Norfolk over the last few months! I will stop complaining about the weather!

First, I hope you won't mind if I celebrate the birth of my second granddaughter in Falls Church, Virginia, just two days ago. Her name is Alina Rose. She is, as far as I can tell, the very first Howes to be named Alina. Congratulations to her parents: Tim and Meghan.

"Reunited after nearly a lifetime apart"
You may recall that I have a daily web search set up to report on the goings on for people with our name around the world. The above headline sparked my interest and when I looked at the underlying article, I found the most amazing story about Eliza Howes and Edwin Dow. I can't put it much better than the article, which you can read here: https://johnstonsunrise.net/stories/reu ... art,167823.

As I researched the family i found that the article merely recycles one from the Boston Globe which was written at the time of the couple's second marriage in 1903! One remarkable additional fact that I found: the two witnesses at that 1903 wedding were the couple's daughter and grandson! How many couples can say that?! Certainly Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor didn't manage it!
Here is Eliza's record

The one really intriguing aspect to Eliza's family is that her brother, father and grandfather were all named Theophilus. Her father was born right at the end of Cape Cod at Provincetown in 1794, the middle of three brothers. The location suggests a connection to the wider family of Thomas Howes and Mary Burr, but despite the unusual given names, I've been unable to find anything more about them. Can anyone help?

"New Band President"
They say that you can take a man out of England but you cannot take England out of the man! I feel this particularly with regard to many of the British musical traditions. So my attention was grabbed by another headline during the month, naming a Stephen Howes as the new President of the Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band: https://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/news/p ... nt-3402023

For those who aren't aware, brass bands are a fixture of Northern English life, particularly among old mining communities. The cleanliness of the instruments, the uniforms and the music itself were such a contrast with the grimy circumstances in which working men (mostly) spent their daily lives. There was, and still is, intense rivalry between different bands, with the Brighouse and Rastrick being one of the most successful over a long period of time.

If you've never heard a brass band at its best, try this piece: Nimrod, by Elgar, a quintessentially English piece of musicL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWxrcwupDGY. Enjoy!

Now, considering that Howes is a name from Southern England, I was amazed to find two possible Stephen Howes births in the Brighouse/Hailfax area of southern Yorkshire within just a few miles and months of each other. So, although both are in our database I can't figure out which Stephen is the bandsman. So I repeat: can anyone help?!

Native artist, Sarah Howes, paints striking new mural
I think I have mentioned Sarah before. She has a very unusual middle name of Agaton, and I still don't have her in our database. She's done a terrific job with the mural in Duluth, Minnesota and she explains it very well in the video in the news article.
https://www.fox21online.com/2021/10/19/ ... new-mural/
So, who is she? Anyone know?

Our monthly progress
We added an unusually large number of people to our database this month: over 1,500! By far, most of them are from Kentucky, indeed mostly from four counties in the South East of the state: Clay, Jackson, Knox & Laurel. It all started with a single obituary (!) sent to me with some hints from Ancestry about how that person and their forebears joined up with a family already in our database. The senders were some regular volunteers, Chris and Judith Jordan (she, nee Howes) from Central England. Sometimes, the deceased person is already in our database and it's simple to extract details from the obituary. This one looked very involved and I had set it aside for over a year. Once I got into it, I realized it was even more involved than usual. The ancestors of the person who passed were also the ancestors of an already large family in our file, featuring both House and Howes surnames. We've now pushed that 2,000 person family back as far as we can go, without spending time in local archives in Maryland poring through property records!

So, if you are waiting for me to reply to a more recent note, I'm sorry, but I hate half-done work and I didn't want to put this particular project down until I had done at least a half-decent job with it! I have now done that and will get to your notes in dur course

All the best for upcoming holidays and thanks for your continued support
Paul
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