Keeping Howes - December 2024

Post Reply
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 317
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Keeping Howes - December 2024

Post by mardler »

Hi folks, and a happy new year to you and yours. I got to spend Christmas with much of my family. It was wonderful to see how my youngest granddaughter is growing, playing and learning to have fun interacting with other people. I may have said this before but it bears repeating: one of the joys of being a grandparent is that all your grandchildren are above average!

Fancy taking a DNA test? (Or, giving one to someone else?)
The Guild of One-Name Studies continues to offer cheap DNA tests. They now have a Christmas sale on until the end of January. The yDNA test in particular is now only about half the price it was when I first started asking people to take it. We recommend it for any Howes/House/Howse etc man who is interested in seeing where his Howes ancestors hailed from.
Not having a Y-chromosome, ladies cannot take the test. However, if you have a male Howes brother, or father or uncle, or cousin, they could take the test for you. Best to ask them first, though!
We’re not quite as keen on the Family Finder test, although there’s nothing wrong with it, or the scienceused! It’s similar to the one available from Ancestry, but FTDNA does not have as big a database in which you can find people to match with. However, on the plus side, FTDNA’s price is ridiculously low AND being project administrators we can offer you help in reviewing your results.
Order your DNA test here: https://one-name.org/dna-kits-available-from-the-guild/

Do you have US ancestors with who served in the Military?
If so, you may well be interested in this brand new database, released just a few days ago on Christmas Day. It contains over 18 million records. If you find someone you are interested in, you can send a request for the person’s military file, FREE OF CHARGE under the Freedom of Information Act!
Read more here: https://mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/th ... fax-system

There are well over 4,000 people in the file with one of our names. It's interesting to note that three-quarters of them are named House! Does anyone have the time to send for a few records for us?

Do you know Rachel House from New Zealand?
A correspondent write to me yesterday, saying, “Whilst watching TV over Christmas I noticed Rachel House as the voice of Gramma Tala in the credits to the animated film Moana. (She also appears in the recently released sequel - Moana 2). A bit of research later (thank you Wikipedia and others) I've found that she is a New Zealand actress and director, born Rachel Jessica Te Ao Maarama House, with many films, TV shows and theatre roles to her credit which have earned her numerous awards.

“Wikipedia says that her adoptive parents were John and Sheila House, described as Scottish which is backed up by an interview in "Woman" magazine which says she grew up in Whangarei with her adopted Glaswegian parents and what she had to do to find her birth parents. There is also an interview with her on youtube from 2020. I know that she isn't a member of the extended families by birth but her parents will be.”

We are happy to include anyone with the surname House, even if they weren’t born with such an illustrious name! Our question is, then, who are her adoptive parents? Anyone know them?

Our monthly progress, and more
It’s been an even busier month than average. I finally finished my marriage project and submitted a list of 50,800 marriages to the Guild of One-Name Studies for their public indexes. It covers every marriage in our file up to 1980. It included marriages from 59 countries! Here’s a list of countries covered:
England – 38,710
USA – 8,867
Canada – 912
Australia – 875
Wales – 784
New Zealand – 284
South Africa – 132
Ireland – 62
Scotland – 59
India – 34
Channel Is – 20
Germany – 19
Gibraltar – 16
France – 13
St Helena – 12
China – 11
Northern Ireland - 11

Countries from 5 to 10: Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, Mexico, Singapore

Others: Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Bermuda, Burma, Cyprus, Greece, Indonesia, Iraq, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Malasia, Malta, Montserrat, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Seychelles, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Quite a list! Our database reflects the history of the English-speaking peoples. There are no native Howes people in China or India, as far as I know. All the marriages from those places are of expatriates (from UK, and US too) mostly marrying other expats. Many others are/were among armed service personnel marrying in their overseas stations.

One of the things I did was to check through all the marriages in our file and add more detail where we could find it. Of the 33,800 total marriages in England and Wales from 1837 to 1980, we now know the identity of both parties for nearly 85% and the date and place for almost 40%.

I will say too that in the last few days, we’ve already added another 100 marriages to a list of extra items to share in the coming months. Some of them have come from a correspondent who reached out to offer help. Sue is checking all of our marriages for Gloucestershire in England to see if I missed any online details, and I had. Anyone else want to check a county? Simple process: I give you a list and you check for any where we do not have actual date and place.

We added almost 800 people during the month finishing at 217,671 people in our master file, about 60,000 of whom are hidden thanks to our confidentiality guarantee. And a few other numbers to finish up: our GED file now has 8.2million lines in it, amounting to 165 megabytes! Amazingly, it took only 7 seconds to upload that entire file to the web for it to be processed into the online file that we all use!

Maturity of our database
I just ran the SURNAMES function on the website. Here’s a list of the surnames we focus on with the numbers of people born with each name:
Howes – 45,290
House – 31,945
Howse – 8,367
Howze – 1,302
Hows – 743
Houze – 227

You may recall that we get a daily feed from the web, with mentions of our study names. Many of those news items are obituaries. Some years ago I began to notice that, increasingly, we could quickly identify those in England and Wales who had passed. That’s now becoming the case too with those in North America named Howes. It’s not yet the case for people named House because their numbers are so large, stemming from the German origins of the name as well as the British. But we will get there too!

What’s next?
I have a few short-term things to do, for example a couple of presentations to do here in Florida next month. I then have to focus on catching up on past correspondence which I have put to one side during the marriage project. Then I must think about upgrading the software on our website. Already you can see the cracks developing: the maps on every individual’s page stopped working 3 or 4 months ago!

Oh, and I will be on a cruise in the Southern Oceans for a month starting in mid-January. So there may not be a monthly newsletter but I promise a penguin picture at least when I return!

Thank you for your continuing support, folks. Paul
Post Reply