Man about the Howze - December 2022

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

Man about the Howze - December 2022

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Hello everyone. We’ve reached the end of 2022. The new year begins tomorrow, and may well already have started by the time many people read this. I want to thank everyone who has helped us during the year, whether by adding photographs or certificates, some extra details about their family, contributing toward our certificate buying fund, telling your Howes/House/Howse/etc relatives and friends about us, working as a part of our team, or whatever. Your contributions are greatly appreciated. There’s no way we could have achieved what we have without the help of hundreds of people, which was our very hope when we started out back in 2008.

Our progress
We added 650 people this month to finish on 202,678 people in our master file. We added a total of 12,000 people during the year. In addition, I’ve been working through the 1921 census entries for people named House that I collected last summer. We have about 4,400 images online, with a few more to add. All that sounds pretty big, but what you might not appreciate is that our master file in GED format is now 7.3 million lines long, all text! Apart from a few early merge files back In 2008 all of it has been entered by hand.

ROOTSTECH 2023
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Once again, I am a RootsTech Ambassador this year. Full disclosure: if I say nice things about the conference (which, I assure you, I would do anyway) I get free admission to the conference in Salt Lake City from March 2 – 4. ANNNNND, as an Ambassador, I get to give away a free onsite attendance ticket to another person – that’s almost US$100 worth of value.

I’ve tried various methods over the years to figure out the best way to offer tickets to a global audience. Honestly, though, the cost of travel to Utah and staying there for a few days means that it’s unrealistic to expect more than a few readers to be able to attend. So, IF you are interested in attending in person, for free, please send an email to me at paul (at) howesfamilies {dot} com with the work RootsTech in the title and I will add you to the prize draw. Entries in by noon Eastern (US) Standard Time Jan 17, please. That will give you plenty of time to organize any necessary travel. I will also be offering the same chance to a couple of facebook groups I’m a member of.

Please do remember too that since the last onsite conference three years ago, RootsTech has expanded to being online as well as in-person. With over 1million online participants, RootsTech is the largest genealogy event, ever! This year, the emphasis is on families and on being inclusive worldwide. So there are more and more sessions in languages other than English.

Do check https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/event/rt2023 for more information including a starring list of speakers. Registration is already open. If you have already registered, and would like to enter the free prize draw, not a problem. The good folks at RootsTech will refund your ticket price should you win.

Getting older
At some point, I know I will become a statistic in my own study, though obviously I hope it’s not for while yet! I have a significant birthday coming up in just a few days and in honor of my reaching my “three score years and ten” Mrs H and I are taking some time out to go on a cruise around South America and the Falkland Islands between mid-January and mid-February. I will be reaching out to one or two HowesFamilies correspondents who live down that way to see if we can meet, but my main point in mentioning this is that I am not sure at this point whether we will actually have a newsletter at the end of January or not. So, if you hear nothing, don’t be over-worried that the grim reaper has come a-calling!

Live in Scotland? Can you help, please?
Last month I talked about the release of the 1921 census North o’the Border. I asked whether anyone within reach of Edinburgh might be able to help. An English reader pointed out my error: Edinburgh is not the only place where one can view the 1921 census. There are in fact several others: Alloa, Glasgow, Hawick, Inverness and Kilmarnock. Are any of these within easy reach of anyone? Can you help, please? Drop me a line if you can and we can go over details.

Howes in the news
Turns out I was in the news last month, and I forgot to mention it! I received an email sent to a wide distribution by the makers of the software I use in my study, Family Historian. They were recommending a video I made for the Guild of One-Name Studies about how I use their software. I actually made two videos for the Guild this year, the other being how I conduct this study. You can see them both from the links on this page: https://one-name.org/howesons2/

Another item on November’s cutting room floor concerned the firm of S Howes in upper New York State on the shores of Lake Erie. It was started by Simeon Howes and some of his extended family back in 1856 and for over 160 years has been making industrial processing equipment, having started with a machine to clean and refine grain from the many mills in the US and beyond. In fact it was a British correspondent who had seen a plaque dedicated to the firm in Derbyshire in England at a working museum. Quite by chance, one of my fellow researchers was simultaneously working on extending the Howes Genealogy book for this family! So, you can read a lot more about Simeon on his page here: https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename and see more about what S Howes is still up to in 2023 here: https://www.showes.com/about/.

Over the years, we have shared news about the US champion cyclist, Alex Howes. Well, we won’t be doing that as much in the future, because he is retiring from road-racing and moving on to off-road competition. To read more about his career successes, click here: https://www.velonews.com/news/road/ef-e ... lex-howes/

Thanks everyone for your continued support
Paul
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