House your father? - September 2016

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

House your father? - September 2016

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. Happy new month! September proved fruitful for us as we added 1,000 new people into our database, finishing tonight at 112,775 people. Lots of things to talk about this month.

Concidence?
I had a marvellous note from Tony House in Somerset concerning barn owls, one of Britain's most distinctive birds and certainly the quietest in flight. He volunteers for the Somerset Wildlife Trust and,among other duties, puts up nesting boxes for them on the Somerset levels. He tells me that he tries his best to photograph them too.
Tony was lying in bed one Sunday morning watching the BBC's CountryFile TV programme. The presenters had just chosen their favourite wildlife photographs for the programme's 2017 calendar. One of their selections was a picture of a barn owl taken by a . . . Tony Howes! Does anyone know the Tony Howes who took that picture? It would be nice to connect Tony House and Tony Howes. If anyone finds a copy of that picture too, it would be great to feature that in one of our newsletters.

Paying respects to those no longer with us
Many of the readers of this note are descendants of Thomas Howes and Mary Burr who arrived in Massachusetts about 1636. Many of those will have ancestors buried in the Howes Family Plot in Dennis, MA. So I was interested to read the following article on the web concerning a working party who turned out on a Sunday morning to clean the stones. Find out how they did it, here
http://dennis.wickedlocal.com/news/2016 ... -in-dennis

Classic American obituary
While we are on the subject of death in America, I wanted to share something else. One of the joys of conducting a global One-Name Study is finding the cultural differences in approach to various aspects of recording our life on this planet. American obituaries are marvellous, giving so many details about a person and their family that they are a key tool for genealogists. Here is a classic example from the past month:
http://www.sunjournal.com/news/obituari ... es/1998679
Our sympathies go to Mr Howes's family, of course, but I wanted to share it so that many readers can compare and contrast with the few lines that most people receive in newspapers outside North America.

Snippets
-- We have a Chippendale among us. Check out the picture of them working with Mariah Carey onstage at Las Vegas:
http://lasvegas.informermg.com/2016/09/ ... rs-palace/.
A gig with Mariah sounds like fun! Jon Howes is the one on the left. Does anyone know where he hails from?
-- Kudos to (Mabel) Ena Howes from Lowestoft in Suffolk, England who has just been presented with the Legion d'honneur by the French government for her efforts in the Second World War. You cannot see her record in our database because she is still alive but she is recorded on the web here: https://norfolkwomeninhistory.com/1900-1950/ena-howes/
-- We have a few Howes families in Sweden! See: https://sputniknews.com/europe/20160908 ... antes.html
I connected with Kristian on facebook and it turns out that his father is from Zimbabwe. I'm hoping to hear from him. Kristian also told me that he knows of two other Howes families there but has had no contact with them.
-- Thanks to John Howe, who has some Howes ancestors and who has agreed to join our team to gradually work through Australian military records, placing the "diggers" back into their family contexts.
-- It was a pleasure to meet June Sewell Cooper (nee Howes) in Norwich, England this month. We swapped some Howes stories and she shared her research with me, which I have already started to integrate into our database.

Free data sources
You know I like to share free stuff when I can. Here are two excellent sources:
-- does anyone have ancestors from Bath, Somerset? You might like to know that the local record office has just put online 240,000 records from 1660 to the present day! You can find details here: http://www.batharchives.co.uk/bath-burial-index. Anyone fancy working through the Howeses, Howses and Houses in there to figure out where each fits in our database? No rush at all - work at your own pace.

-- Irish genealogy online. If you have Irish ancestors this is a must. It's been publicized quite well, but just in case you haven't heard, a huge collection of civil Birth, Marriage and Death records have just been put online for free at: https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/ ... search.jsp. I started looking through and was able to add quite a bit to our holdings one evening, until I got sidetracked and haven't come back to it. Anyone else want to have a go?

And finally
Lastly, you may recall that earlier in the year I asked for contributions to help our certificate buying effort. Several people came back and offered donations, including one person who bought six and emailed them to me. Thank you, everyone. I've kept a little money in reserve and added to it myself, buying 40 certificates two weeks ago. They've all arrived and they have made a big impact, enabling us to bring together families which we hadn't been able to connect. There are just two puzzlers which I may mention next month if we still cannot figure them out by then. However, there are still some 30 on my list of desirable ccertificates. If you'd like to help us out with a small contribution, please do get in touch.

I'd better stop here. I'll save the piece I was going to write about DNA for another time. Let's just say, if you are thinking of doing a DNA test, please do get in touch. Through the Guild of One-Name Studies, I can obtain them at a discount.
Thanks for your continued support. Paul
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