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Sherlock Howes
Early in the month we were contacted by Paul Finch, who is a postcard collector. He had found a postcard from around 1925 of a storefront in England belonging to an "O A Howes" and wanted help in identifying the shopkeeper and the location. It took less than 15 minutes to find the answer! The shop belonged to an Oscar Howes and was situated about 400yards from where I grew up in Norwich! See: http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename for a scan of the postcard.
We're quite pleased during the month too to have traced two Michigan families (one Howes and one House) back to their "home villages" in the UK: Wacton in Norfolk and Walton in Somerset. If you have a connection to either place you may find you have "new" family!
Help from Guild of One-Name Studies members
It's been a bumper month for interaction with other Guild members. We've had the results from several "marriage challenges" run by Guild members where they look up marriage register entries for other members, for example, for Worcester, Aston and St George Hanover Square in London. Apart from them,
- Kevin Hurley of the Peapell One-Name Study managed to find some early House references from 14th century Poll tax returns in Wiltshire
- Phil Hand of the Hickling One-Name Study found a marriage certificate for a Hickling/Howes marriage certificate
- Several Guild members and I swapped notes on three very handy websites for New Zealand genealogy:
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies - Dictionary of NZ biography
http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz - Past NZ newspapers
http://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/Home/ - NZ BDM - At the RootsTech conference, I was pleased to meet over a dozen Guild members!
Then, Debbie Kennett of the Cruwys One-Name Study has written a really good piece in layman's language on the uses of DNA in family history. You can find it here: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/blog.p ... na-testing.
We are now able to source DNA tests through the Guild for £80 or local currency equivalent. If you are interested, please do get in touch.
Milestones
We've passed a couple more milestones on our study this month:
- We now have more than 10,000 people named House in our database
- We now know the identity of both partners for more than 12,000 marriages in England and Wales between 1837 and 1950 - that's over 50% and so we are now on the downslope!
Corporal David Robert Howes
Finally, I want to mention a very unusual homily. 25 years ago this month, two British soldiers happened upon an IRA funeral in Belfast and were themselves killed. One was Corporal Howes. The killings were witnessed by a catholic woman who this month wrote a letter to the soldiers' father. Regardless of whatever feelings you may have about the British in Ireland, this letter is uniquely touching and I think worth a read. You can find it here: http://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php? ... ee=Onename