Man about the Howse - June 2022

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

Man about the Howse - June 2022

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. Happy new month! Half the year gone already. Nights beginning to draw in slightly already, at least up here in the Northern part of the world! And it’s warmed up, finally. So no more moaning about the weather here in Norfolk!

Howes that for business advice?
I saw a very interesting article this month. It comes from Ratchet and Wrench magazine and was written by Bruce Howes, who runs an automobile dealership and repair shop in Maine. I noted the URL and put in his personal record in our file, thinking I might want to look at it again one day. Lo and behold; no more than a week later, Bruce wrote in and is now registered on our site! So I told him how interesting it was and how much it paralleled my own experience in a totally different industry and we started a conversation. Bruce talks about the importance of humility in managers at the same time as they build a culture in their organization. He makes an analogy with the US Marine Corps which says that “Officers eat last” and relates how he puts it into practice in his own business.
In my management consulting firm, we had a similar approach. We had no titles on our business cards until we reached 12,000 associates and one of our key watch words to managers was, “Look out for your clients first, your associates second and yourself last.” It only works if managers hold themselves to that, of course, but it’s great when it works, and it did.
So, in case there’s anyone else out there who might value this, I offer up Bruce’s article:
https://www.ratchetandwrench.com/articl ... s-eat-last
Click on Bruce’s name for more articles

RootsTech 2023
I’ve been to half a dozen RootsTech conferences in Salt Lake City. They are wonderful. So many genealogists in one space all having a good time and plenty of opportunity to do research in the Family History Library either side of the conference. I’ve missed that camaraderie the past couple of years, though as you know, two million people joined virtually earlier this year. So, next year the powers have determined that the conference will be BOTH in person AND virtual. YAY!
More to come in future months but it's worth a reminder that you can see 1,500 presentations from the past two conferences at rootstech.org.

Monthly progress
It’s been an interesting and busy month. I’ve managed to finish going through all of the 1921 England and Wales census entries for households headed by people named HOWS and HOWSE. The good news is that there was very little new in that data: we had already figured out almost all the family structures based upon national indexes of births, deaths and marriages and the 1939 Register created at the beginning of World War 2. There are just four remaining households of single people, mostly widows, whom we now have to revisit.

I’ve also started working through the small number of families named HOWIS in 1921. You might ask why we are looking at them. Isn’t their surname different? The answer is, “Maybe!” We’ve encountered them before, in Cornwall and Nottinghamshire, where their name has frequently been written as Howes. I don’t know anyone with that name, but based on that it’s a good bet that in many places it’s pronounced similarly. A further clue may well come from the surname CRUWYS, which originates in Devon back in the 1300s. That surname today is pronounced the same as CRUZ or CRUISE. Now there used to be a spelling of the HOWES name, HOWYS. By analogy that may well have been pronounced howz, or at least to have evolved in the same way. We will learn more as we work back, but the additional workload from a few extra people is minimal.

Further, longer-term readers of this newsletter will know that we keep track of the number of marriages in England and Wales between 1837 and 1980. There were about 33,500. We’ve now rebuilt families for over 27,000 of them and we aren’t far short of knowing the date and place for 10,000 of them. Feeling very pleased! We finished the month with 196,333 people in our file, having added just over 800 people this month.

Puzzle corner
Here's a puzzle for you addicts out there! In researching a widow who popped up in the 1921 census, we found her in three prior censuses from 1891. Here's her record: https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename
We can see clearly that she was born about 1860 in Richmond, just outside of London, and she married someone named Howse, or possibly House, After her husband died, she moved South to the Brighton area in Sussex. Two questions:
1) who was her husband?
2) what was her maiden name?
Answer one and the other should be clear. Am I missing something obvious?

That's all, folks. Thanks for your continued support
Paul
Post Reply