Man about the Howze - July 2022

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mardler
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Man about the Howze - July 2022

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Phew! What a month! No more cold weather in Norfolk, apart from the refreshingly cool sea breezes. I had a full sailing program this month and as I write this I'm between regatta weeks.

July's activities
Despite my outdoor interruptions we added over 1,400 people to our file this month, way above our normal total. I've been trying to figure out why it was so many. My mind is a blur! Here are a few tasks I can remember:
- the warm weather appears to have drawn out many correspondents, two of whom share their trees with us, providing us with many new names.
- we've been helping an Australian correspondent figure out her family tree. The key person in it is a William Howes who was born in London but whose birth registration is still hidden from us. There are family stories about his nickname being "Klondike Bill", though we know he went abroad (to Australia AND New Zealand) and returned to England at least 20 years prior to the Klondike! Currently we are waiting for a New Zealand birth certificate to reveal the mother's name.
- we saw quite a few obituaries for various people during the month. Several of these resulted in a lot of new people before we were able to join the families up to another one already in our database. I will say in passing that just as we have found in the UK, even our US and Canadian records are now getting so good that we are frequently finding that the obituary refers to someone already in our file.
- we also finished the 1921 England and Wales census entries for households headed by people named Howse.

So, we finish the month with 197,741 people in our file making it a near certainty that we will reach 200,000 people before the end of the year, probably in November, and maybe before.

Joseph Howse family
Here's the answer to the puzzle in the email.
Joseph Howse - a trailblazer
Joseph Howse - a trailblazer
HowsePass1A.jpg (252.01 KiB) Viewed 813 times
I want to acknowledge the photography skills of correspondent, Stephen Howes from a relatively flat Huntingdonshire in England, who was fortunate enough to visit the Canadian Rockies and happen upon the trails of Joseph Howse.

By sheer co-incidence, one of those obituaries I referred to above was for a descendant is this man. Born in Cirencester in Gloucestershire, he went to the Canadian NorthWest on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company back in the early 1800s. Joseph was a polymath, among other things compiling the first dictionary of the native Cree language. His record, here
https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename
contains links to several interesting articles about him - recommended reading. He left more than memories behind in Canada, with a large number of descendants bearing his surname.

Just a few days ago, I discovered the link noted in Source #7 on his record, which has provided much useful information. We will use it as a base for future research and add to it where we can, just as we are doing for the Howes Genealogy book, where this month we have added quite a lot of Howes descendants in West Virginia.

It's worth adding too that we found this in the obituary of Joseph's eldest granddaughter to survive infancy, Jane Howse: ""Jane Howse was an extraordinary woman who hunted buffalo on the White Horse Plain near present day Winnipeg and traveled across the prairie by the Carlton Trail in a Red River cart to become one of the first settlers at Fort Victoria near present day Edmonton." She was an extraordinary woman, and she married an extraordinary man, Sam Livingston, who has his own entry in the Canadian Dictionary of Biography.

MyHeritage blog post
At the very start of the month, several members of the Guild of One-Name Studies drew my attention to this blog post from the folks at MyHeritage.
https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/06/i-u ... ew-secret/
Their DNA testing service had been key to unlocking the mysteries of the family of Lisa Katsiaris. Not only did she discover the name of her mystery grandfather, Robert Howes, but also that Robert was himself the product of a liaison between her great-grandmother;s third husband and her daughter! It's a great piece of research.

Thamls to MyHeritage, we were put in touch with Lisa, and with her help were able to fill in the details of what had been for us a complex piece of research already, given the number of relationships involved.

For anyone sceptical of what DNA can do, this blog should be an eye-opener

"That's all folks!"
Paul
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