Putting our Hows in order - June 2023

[mardler]

Hello everyone. This is just a short note this month. I've had my head down, working hard, when I haven't been yachting at weekends! The picture refers.

Marriage project progress
Last month I described how I'm working on exporting a list of well over 47,000 pre-1980 marriages from our database for the Guild of One-Name Studies database. I won't go into all the gory details, but suffice it to say that I made it more complicated for myself! Thing is, since we started doing our research, SO much extra data has come online, thanks to the good folks at Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, FindMyPast, MyHeritage and Newspapers.com, all of which we use regularly. Consequently, as I'm working through the British marriages, I decided to look to see whether I can add extra details about each marriage beyond what is easily available from the national public index.

So far, I've worked from 1837 through to 1872. Each year takes about a day to complete and thus far I've added details from the parish registers for about 1,000 marriages! I have only 108 more years to go! It sounds worse than it is, because there's relatively little in the way of marriage data beyond 1930 for confidentiality reasons.

Long-term readers will know that I keep track of Howes/House/Howse /etc marriages for the period from 1837 to 1980. We now know the identity of both partners for 81% of all marriages in that period and we know the date and place for well over 30% - that's more than 10,300. I fully expect that number to increase substantially as My project progresses.

As a result of that we have added only 150 people to our file this month! We now have 206,405 people in the database.

A special obituary
The only other thing I want to share this month is the obituary of an extraordinary man named Howes. WIth this project I get to see many obituaries. Just occasionally, one stands out and remains in the memory, as this one does. The man's name was (Professor) Randolph Michael Howes MD PhD, who devoted his life to the service of others, in many ways. Rather than repeat bits of it, I simply ask you to read it for yourselves, here:
https://www.thompsoncares.com/obituarie ... !/Obituary
"He had a life well lived"

That's all, this time, folks
For those of us in the Northen Hemisphere have a great summer, and to my American compatriots: a very happy 4th.
Paul