September 2012 - Hows that?

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mardler
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Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

September 2012 - Hows that?

Post by mardler »

Last month I posed some questions and was pleased by the response. Many thanks to Dave Howes for helping find the parents of General David George House, who died recently. And, thanks to Jean Howes for figuring out the identity of John Howes, the 19th century philanthropist from Cromer. We'll do this again.

Free stuff
People have been grateful in the past when I've passed on tips for free access. I have noticed that THIS WEEKEND, Ancestry.com.au (and presumably local ancestry affiliates) are providing FREE access to Australian birth, marriage and death indexes. Get to it, because for most of us Australia is several time zones ahead and there's less time left than you think!

Irish ancestry
Several Howes families claim to hail from Ireland, though I suspect several of them originally came from England with Cromwell. Most were surely protestant families and in this regard it's worth noting that this month, a new website appeared containing some details of signatories to the Ulster covenant, an anti-home rule document dating from 1912. I noticed many Irish Howes/House names on it, some of whom lived in Dublin. If there's a volunteer out there who would like to figure out to which families the signatories belonged, please get in touch.

Inventors
Thanks to Rob House for sharing his tree with us. As we worked through we spotted that there were not one, but two inventors in it. First up was Royal Earl House, an engineer who set his mind successfully to an extraordinary variety of problems. His most proud achievement was making the machine that makes Shredded Wheat. And from him we found his uncle, Henry Alonzo House, who invented the first printing telegraph. Amazing men. You can read more about them here: http://howesfamilies.com/people.php?id=17 and here: http://howesfamilies.com/people.php?id=18.

Ryerson Index
Back to Australia for this item. Within the last month the death of Joyce Ryerson was announced. This extraordinary lady was responsible for starting a collection of newspaper clippings of death notices which has no parallel anywhere in the world. Her work is being continued by a team of volunteers. If you have Aussie relatives, this website is a must view: http://www.ryersonindex.org/. Again, if anyone's interested in connecting the Howes people in this index to families in our database, please step forward!

Marking our progress
Almost a thousand lives added this month and we comfortably passed 65,000 people in our database. We sailed through 600 people registered on our site and as of now have 611 signed up. We also breezed through 300,000 sourced facts for the database which, considering we don't source gender and most of our UK census entries weren't sourced either, greatly understates the extent to which our database is credible.

Thanks
To close, I'd just like to record personal thanks to Tim Howes, who has been working his way through Great Yarmouth marriage records for us, and to Chris and Judith Jordan, who are continuing to work through the Commonwealth War Graves website to honour our British Commonwealth war dead.
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