January 2014 - Howes it going?

[mardler]

Hello everyone. This month's newsletter will be relatively brief. I've just spent most of the last month packing boxes and the last two days driving 1,000 miles to our new home in Florida. I'm not sad at all to be leaving what have been relatively harsh winter temperatures, but it does mean that we entered only 500 or so fresh names into our database this month. Hopefully after a few weeks of unpacking, "normal service" can be resumed!

Howes Brothers Photographers
A correspondent reminded me of this group of three brothers who took thousands of photos in New England in the late 19th century/early 20th. 23,000 of the glass plate negatives (that's over two tons) were acquired by the Ashfield Museum and represent one of the finest records of their time. By all means read and see more of their work at:
http://www.ashfieldhistorical.org/collections.html.
I very much regret that the three brothers are not yet in our database - we'll do what we can to fix that!

A Howes in the Philippines typhoon
The word typhoon comes from the Chinese words dai feng, meaning big wind. It's no less or more than a hurricane. In late December a particular bad one struck the Philippine Islands and Leia Howes from Victoria, Australia was there. In a particularly harrying account she related her experience to the Australian broadcaster, ABC, here: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/201 ... 919777.htm.
Does anyone know Leia? She's not in our database either!

Fungibility of our name(s)
I've noted many times about how frequently our names are misspelt and confused with one another. I just want to note here that even in US census records in the early part of the 20th century, I've recently encountered quite a few people in Massachusetts normally named Howes actually referred to sometimes as House. Howes and House were and are well known names in Massachusetts and had been present in the state for close to 300 years by that point and yet were still being confused with each other.
It's very difficult now to know what people said, and what census enumerators heard but this experience is telling me that our study names are more easily confused more often more recently than even I had imagined.

Why does my ancestor have so many dates of birth and death?
As we encounter instances of a person recorded in old documents we try to record everything that each document says about the person. For instance If a person isn't that clear about their age from one census to another, we could end up with, say, seven different estimated years of birth. Their birth date (but not place) may be recorded on a draft registration card, for instance, or their place of birth may be known from a baptism record but not the actual date. Often in census records we find a year rather than an actual date. Sometimes we have to take two or three different pieces of information about a person and then make a composite fact from them. Sometimes different documents might record different dates. ETC., ETC. Only if two records say the same thing about a person do we combine the records and show more than one source.

Samuel Musgrove Howes - Winnie's driver
Another correspondent pointed me toward this man, who in his youth was a driver to Sir Winston Churchill and who ended his days in the USA having become a Senior Engineer for an aerospace company in California. The man's archives are in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and a description of them is here: http://www2.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/h/Howes ... grove.html
Is there anyone who lives close to Chapel Hill who might be able to visit the archives and pull off more interesting material for us? This man IS in our database (!) though we'd love to learn more.

Red Howes beer!
I believe I have noted before that there is a variety of cranberry native to Massachusetts known as Red Howes. An enterprising ex-rock musician has decided to make an adult beverage out of the usual ingredients with the addition of the Reds. Check out the story and a picture of the beverage with our name on it, here:
http://hangout.altsounds.com/news/16398 ... -beer.html
or here:
http://www.metalunderground.com/news/de ... wsid=99435

Has anyone tried it? What did you think? It's 8.3%. So please don't try too many on my account!

All the best for 2014/the year of the horse
Paul