Putting our Howze in order - May 2023

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mardler
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Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Putting our Howze in order - May 2023

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. Happy new month, again!

What was the car?
The car was driven into a pond in Russell's Water, Oxfordfordshire by Sally Anne Howes in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang some 55 years ago. Sally Anne died in December 2021 and this visit by the car was part of a tribute to her life. Read all about it here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-o ... e-65663482

Free photography tool
I think I mentioned a couple of months ago that MyHeritage was planning the release of a new tool, which they have now done. It's a Smartphone App called Reimagine. Rather than try to explain it, it think it's simplest if you simply watch a one-minute video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zawU9mI_lEc
If you prefer to read, the blog post which explains it in detail is here:
https://blog.myheritage.com/2023/05/int ... yheritage/

Our Monthly progress
I'm very pleased to say that we added only 280 people this month - see below. Despite that minimal increment, our master file went past 150 Megabytes, all text, almost all of which we have typed in by hand!

Why so few people? When I was at the Annual Conference of the Guild of One-Name Studies, in late-April, I decided to replace all the marriage data I have contributed to the Guild over the years, and add in our marriages from around the world. I reckon I'm close to half way through the process so far, after about 3 weeks of work. It's been a rewarding process to have embarked upon, enabling me to correct a few errors along the way and add more detail to marriages we already knew existed but didn't have all the data for.

At the end of the process we will have delivered to the Guild a list of 47,100 or so marriages up to 1980 from 45 countries around the world. Countries with more than 100 marriages are all the ones you would expect: England, USA, Canada, Australia, Wales, New Zealand and South Africa, in that order. What's more interesting perhaps is the list of countries with three or fewer marriages: Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Burma, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Turkey and Venezuela. In the middle are, notably: St Helena (10), China (11) and India (19).

The Guild makes the older marriages available to search by the public and all open to other Guild members. Remember that there are 94,200 or so surnames in that list, once finished. When someone finds one of our marriages they are interested in, all they have to do is click on a button which will generate an email to me. Further, for all the English and Welsh marriages between 1837 and 1980, we add in the Volume and Page numbers from the national index. The Guild has so much of that information that on its website, marriage-locator.co.uk it is able to predict the location of a marriage for soneone who only has that index information.

I see this whole process as a further method to give back to the community. It's worth the diversion of effort for a few weeks to get it done.

Talking about surnames . . . .
We had an interesting question this month from a correspondent, Margaret, in Australia. She noted my comment last month about the number of people named HOWSE in our file exceeding 8,000 for the first time, and asked how many people we have named HOWES. Here's how I answered her:
The answer to your question is easily found. Click here:
https://howesfamilies.com/surnames.php, or go to our website and click on SURNAMES in the left column.
I should add, though, that the farther one goes back in time the more many individuals were referred to in written records with more than one spelling. In truth, until the modern growth in literacy, there was no single accepted spelling for any surname. When few people could write, it was the sound which mattered more. Some, like Smith, for example, have been pretty obviously written only one way for centuries. Others, like Howes, Howse and House varied frequently, even when referring to the same person, sometimes even in the same document! You will also find Hows, Howze, Houze and even Houghs. That's why we record each and every variation as we find them. It's only modern computers which force us to pick a single transcription as the primary name for every person.
Hope that aids with understanding.

Puzzle Corner
Anyone up for a puzzle? Beatrice Mary House, https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename, was born in 1919 to a mother named Smart, but we could not figure out who her parents were, there being no easily found House/Smart marriage. It did look like she was named Brown in the 1921 census record in Brighton, but there was no House/Brown marriage either. So we sent for a pdf copy of her birth record, which you can see on her record at the link. It named the parents . . . YAY, but .....
The mother's name was indeed Smart. She did indeed marry a man named Brown a few months after Beatrice's birth.
But who was Percy House and what happened to him? We have a couple of ideas on his record, but nothing certain. Can anyone figure out the mystery, please?

Regards to all
Paul
PatrickCunningham
Posts: 4
Joined: December 31st, 2012, 6:15 pm

Re: Putting our Howze in order - May 2023

Post by PatrickCunningham »

My Howes line includes people who lived in Malaysia and India, for whom I don't have marriage information, so your mention of Howes marriages in these countries has piqued my interest. There's no way I can see in the Howesfamilies website to search for a marriage place - how can I find these marriages please?
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Re: Putting our Howze in order - May 2023

Post by mardler »

Hello Patrick.

Here are some instructions that should work for you.
Go to Advanced Search in the left column on most pages.
Click on Search Families.
Go down to Marriage Place
Click on the button immediately to the right and select "Ends with".
Go to the column on the right and Type India. {Note that if you don't do these last two steps, you will also get lots of marriages in Indiana!]
Then hit the Enter key

You should see a list of 29 marriages (not 19 - my mistake!). If you do not see 29, it will be because at least one of the partners is still alive or, more accurately, not known by us to have died. To see where we obtained the information, click on the underlined Fxxxx number and then on the name of one of the partners. Then look at the number in parenthesis at the end of the marriage fact line and find it in the source list at the foot of the page.
Most will be from registers online at FindMyPast, marriage certificates or newspaper mentions.

Hope this helps you and others. Best regards
Paul
PatrickCunningham
Posts: 4
Joined: December 31st, 2012, 6:15 pm

Re: Putting our Howze in order - May 2023

Post by PatrickCunningham »

I'm obviously blind - I didn't see the 'search families' option. Thanks for putting me right Paul!
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