September 2010 - Hows that?

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

September 2010 - Hows that?

Post by mardler »

It's been two years this month since the website went live. We added another 800 people this month and now stand within sight of 30,000 people, certainly now one of the largest one-name studies anywhere. We continue to add people at roughly that same monthly rate, about 10,000 per year. It's a remarkable collective effort. Thank you for your continuing support. We now have over 240 individuals registered on the site, with 10 extra people or so joining every month.

The database is getting toward a mature stage now, and if you haven't looked at your family recently, please do go back and take a look and see whether we have added to your group and/or check whether you have additional information which you can share with us. In the last 2 weeks, we have had 3 people send in corrections to data. This is excellent. We are really grateful to have people verify our work and thus increase the quality of the information we have.

Some other recent milestones
  • People named House have now passed Howse to become second largest surname in database, with both now over 1,000 individuals. Obviously Howes continues to dominate with now over 12,000
  • It's no co-incidence that Dorset has been getting lots of attention, particularly by my cousin Ian. Measured by counting place names Dorset is now the sixth most represented county in England, after Norfolk, London, Gloucestershire, Kent, Suffolk. Making up the rest of the top ten geographic areas are the USA, Australia, Surrey and Oxfordshire
  • 22 family groups now have more than 200 members, including three with more than 1,000 individuals
  • People born in Norfolk, the original starting point for the database, have finally fallen below 25% of the total!
Individual colour added
As we know, family history ought to be more than just about facts. So it's worth mentioning that we have also added quite a bit of detail about three particular individuals in the past month.

Cheryl Thacker from Utah has completed a long biography of her ancestor Henry Howes from Catfield, his journey from Norwich to Utah and his life as an early Mormon settler. You can find it here: http://www.howesfamilies.com/getperson. ... nID=I03267 . I plan to add some pictures in the next few weeks and make a proper webpage, but if you are interested in the story of how a small family group upped sticks and moved 5,000 miles in the 19th century, it makes a good read.

My cousin, Frances Bartram, shared some newspaper articles concerning her grandfather, Thomas James Howes from Norwich, with me. He was a cheerful community-minded, hard-working man who fought in two world wars. One article tells a fascinating story about his demobilization process at the end of WW2. You can find the articles here: http://www.howesfamilies.com/getperson. ... nID=I00153

Third, I found an interesting obituary for Professor Michael Robert House of Blandford Forum in Dorset. He was a geologist who specialized in fossils from the Devonian period and his work took him around the world. Forgive the pun but he did ground breaking work in showing how astronomical fluctuations affected sedimentation to an accuracy of only 10,000 years, and I wonder whether his work has application in a longer-term perspective on climatic fluctuation. You can find his story here: http://www.howesfamilies.com/getperson. ... nID=I30028

Do you have an interesting story to tell about one of your forebears?

Conclusion
On a personal note, I will be relocating back to New Jersey in the next few weeks and looking for work. So my attention will be reduced for a while. Please help out! If you have additional data or corrections to send in, please do so. It's generally much easier to keep things going by adding to what others have done than starting from original source materials which is what we normally do.
All the best to you and yours.
Paul
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