What this site aims to do is collect information on Howes/Hows/Howse/House (shortened to Ho*** below) clan members, not their spouses’ forebears. Where a spouse’s parents are known, that fact is noted, but generally not pursued. Just occasionally, however, two Ho*** people married in which case all Ho*** ancestors are noted. We collect information on all descendents of Ho*** clan members, however. Our goal is to be the resource for all people researching the Ho*** names.
The aim of this page is to describe how we work and to explain some of the conventions used on the site, for example, our approach to calculating years of birth from census information is different though more accurate than the traditional way. Where someone sends in a GED file, we do our best to convert it to a similar format to the notes below (certainly with addresses). If we didn't do that, the site would lose the benefit of consistency.
General
We aim to collect every known “fact” about every person, at least starting with census records! That includes collecting census age even if actual date of birth is known. It means that we never throw anything away, except for incorrect guesses! By doing that, we are completely open. It saves others time looking up other sources and our work can be checked.
Many family history programs (including the one we use) treat date and place of birth as a single "fact". We might find that no single source provides the entire fact. In that case we note other sources and infer the fact, stating it without a source.
“St” means Saint as in St Peter; we spell out words like Street and Road in full.
When calendar quarter is known from a source like FreeBMD, we use Abt., (ie, approx) the middle month
Spelling is as written; If it says “laborer” that’s how they wrote it! British readers might like to note that there are many UK instances of colour, labour and so on being spelled without a "u" in old British documents!
Addresses
Addresses are typed in as per source, unless it is completely obvious that it is the same place as a slightly more accurate address used elsewhere
We don't use country (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) in UK addresses but let the county define the place.
Where UK county boundaries have changed, we generally use the current county, noting “formerly xxxxxxx" in the description field. It isn't quite as simple as that, however, because we also use traditional county names instead of West Midlands, Clwyd, Gwynedd, Humberside, and so on.
Dates
We format dates as DD MMM YYYY, that being the effective global genealogy standard.
Dates of birth are calculated as census year – age – 1. Given that 6 of 7 published UK censuses took place at around the end of March, this method will be correct 75% of the time. Similar logic applied to US censuses some of which took place on June 1 means that the method will still be correct the majority of the time (about 58%) as it will for the 1841 UK census.
Names
We use the word “Unknown” to refer to a known individual’s surname (eg, female maiden name) or first name (eg, the husband of a widow in a census) and the word “Placeholder” to refer to an unknown individual or individuals, eg, the parent(s) of grandchildren living with grandparents in a census.
Sources
Actual census date has been used for UK censuses in 1841/51 with only the years used for other years. Intention is to change the latter at some point.
FreeBMD is used as a proxy source for looking up in national BMD register indexes, whether the actual source is FreeBMD, Ancestry or some other online site. Where FreeBMD is noted as a source for the name, it usually means that this is where we have found a woman’s maiden name, or someone's middle name.
Originally, we did not note sources if they gave the same answer for year of birth, for example, but as time has gone on we now note all source data
What could be next on the to do list?
There is SO much data available on the internet. It seems to be growing faster than the ability of two people to catalogue it! Can you help?
We maintain a list of sites we would love to work through to find Ho*** data for adding in to what we have. Some are big, some are small. Can you help?
Paul. Sepember 2010
