"Collaborate: To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort" - American Heritage Directory
Family history research principles have become well-established over many years. You start with what you know and work backwards from there. You check your sources and look for at least two separate corroborating facts before proceeding to the next step. That makes complete sense. When I started out with this hobby, I found out the hard way what can happen when you jump too far too fast: you find that you have wasted many hours of your time, quite possibly other people's time too, and even money in some circumstances.
This website has some very lofty goals, I know. So I started from two simple premises:
1 - I'm not smart enough to reconstruct the entire HOWES pedigree!
2 - Neither do I have the time to do it on my own!
What this told me is that I need to collaborate to survive. This is a classic internet approach, just like wikipedia, but instead wiki-family-history!
Problem: I needed data to get started. So I decided to enter all of the data from the 1901 census, and then use the standard principles from there, combining family groups as I then entered 1891 data, 1881 data, and so on. I should add that my cousin Ian helped materially during this process by looking at data by village and making connections between family groups for clusters of Howes clan members, such as in Fundenhall and Cawston areas. It took a whole year to enter up just data from the Norwich area in my spare time during evenings.
Now I have lots of data in my file, and this is where you come in, in one of two ways, please:
1 - accuracy check
2 - additional data
Accuracy check
If you come from a Howes family, or have access to Howes data, please do take a look at what I have done and tell me how well I've done so far. I'm very happy to enter into discussion, and have already used my guesswork to help improve the research of someone who contacted me through Genes Reunited. That was a great test and proved to me that I had the right concept, but it was also a reminder of how easy it is to make a bad judgement call. Please do help me eliminate mine.
Additional data
If you have Howes data that goes beyond mine, such as data from another part of the world, or that goes back farther in time, would you share it please?
If you have time, and would like to contribute to the wider Howes community, would you consider helping out with research?
If you can share data, my ideal would be:
a GEDCOM file, but if not available, any kind of record (Excel, Word, jpg, even paper!); retyping material takes up time for us and we try to avoid it if possible.
individuals contained: anyone called Howes or Howse, or their descendants
information: any info on birth, baptism, death, burial, marriage, residence, occupation, education, military service
scope of information: as much as possible (I quite understand if you want to restrict the amount sent on living people, though pls note that living people's details cannot be seen by the public)
source material: please quote sources where you can, so that others can see how we reached our conclusons
format of things like addresses - follow the format we use on the website, but don't worry about too much about detail, or dates and so on. We can handle that for you
other material: certificates or photographs, yes, please!
delivery mechanism: email to paul@howesfamilies.com but a mailed disk would be fine.
That's my ideal. If you can't do all of it, no matter. Do what you can, or get in touch and we can talk about the possible!
And, do you have any certificates you can share? Ideally, what I'd like are files about 6" wide (about 15cm) or 900px at 150dpi. These are files of about 200Kb. They load easily and yet are clear enough to read the detail
Finally, if this site generates enough interest, I'm very willing to pool all the data in it and start a more formal association of the Howes clan and organize this effort properly. Let me know if you'd like to help out.
Paul. November 2008
