Man about the Howze - February 2022

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

Man about the Howze - February 2022

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. A much foreshortened note this month as I am on vacation, as you will have seen from my picture. My wife and I have been in Antigua for nearly two weeks and leave tomorrow. We've had a week on a yacht sailing the local waters and a few days either side in a hotel in Nelson's Dockyard here.

As an aside for those of us descended from the Howes family of Montserrat, I would dearly love to have visited there. This island was only 20 miles away from us at one point and we could see it clearly. However, Covid19 restrictions currently mandate a 5-day quarantine for all visitors. So it will have to be "some other time"!

Rootstech 2022
The big event for family historians all over the world this month will be RootsTech, now under 3 days away. See this one minute video from Steve Rockwood, who leads Family Search International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWcMlxHpbQ.

I do encourage everyone to sign up at Rootstech.org, even if you are busy toward the end of this week and can't attend in person. Why? Well,
(1) most of the sessions are pre-recorded or will be recorded and you will be able to view them for free at any time during the next year
(2) there are other features that RootsTech offers, including the ability to see distant relatives who are also attending. To do this, you will need to add yourself and enough ancestors into the FamilySearch tree to connect to someone already there. Currently, I have 410 relatives attending. I like to look through this list of relatives to check whether I have my own ancestry accurate and/or whether others also have. Two or three years ago, I had to make some corrections to the Howes portion of some other people's trees as several LDS members had claimed my great-great grandfather as one of theirs! I added in several certificates to prove my case and directed them to the howesfamilies.com record of the correct Thomas Howes from Norwich who was their ancestor!
(3) it's FREE!
Small postscript: one facebook friend I have has 65,000+ relatives attending! That number will increase dramatically as more people sign up in the next 3 days!

Our monthly progress
With internet access fitful here, especially from the yacht, we haven't added quite as many people as we would normally, focusing instead on keepin up correspondence with the many people who write in every day. Right now we have 192,682 people in our master file.
As mentioned last month, we have passed another big milestone in our efforts to document all the . British family historians are very lucky to have virtually complete records of births, marriages and deaths since the beginning of national registration in 1837. We made a list of all the Howes/etc marriages from 1837 to 1980 and keep track of which ones we have found. We also note the date and location as we find those extra details. So, of the 33,455 marriages, we know the identity of both partners in 26,784 of them. We passed the 80% mark this month! As a matter of interest too, you might like to know that we know the date and place for 9,722 of them too - that's not far short of 30%.

Of course, if you have more information about marriages that we don't already have, or dates and places where we only have the index information, please do let us know. And, if you have the actual certificates, we'd like to put those online too; just send us a scan or a photo taken with your smart phone.

1921 census for England and Wales
Just a quick word to say thank you to the 3 or 4 correspondents who have downloaded 1921 census records and have told us what they contain. We have over 400 source references to the census so far, and we are keen to have more. Hint . . . .! By way of comparison, we have 71,000 references to the 1939 Register and 66,000 references to the 1911 census!

Thanks for being there, folks.
Paul
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