Going round the HOWZEs - September 2017

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

Going round the HOWZEs - September 2017

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Happy new month, folks. I'm amazed that three-quarters of the year have passed already. The big news this month is that we added over a thousand new people to our database and now have over 125,000 people in our database. Thanks are due to everyone who has helped with, particularly my cousin Ian Howes and Mike Howes who continue to send me files to merge. They both do quality research as you can see from the results online. I'm very happy that Mike has turned his attention to Oxfordshire as he has managed to extend our tree for the Howes/Howse family from the village of Stonesfield and bring together four different 'twigs' that we already had into one 'branch'. There is more to come from that village.

Thanks to to everyone who has helped us with detailed data from their family. No matter how hard we try from the outside, nobody knows their family like someone within it! Cheeky or not, all of our items this month have a 'more help wanted" character to them!

Joan Myfanwy Howes
A fellow member of the Guild of One-Name Studies is currently volunteering at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, England. She sent us pictures of several Howes/House gravestones from the military cemetery there, all of which are now online. One of them was for a Joan Myfanwy Howes who died in 1947. She is recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves website too, but there are NO personal or family details for her. She was a "WAAF", Women's Auxiliary Air Force. It's not clear to me whether she was born a Howes or had married one. Can anyone help, please?

House Brothers in Kentucky
I'm conscious that it's very difficult to find material each month on a House family related topic. It's just not worth adding House into my daily news feed request, for rather obvious reasons. I fret that our House correspondents feel like we don't give them due weight - not the case at all. So I was really pleased when correspondent Sharon Fuller wrote to me with this link to a site describing how three brothers in Kentucky, Hershel, Frank and John House, are building beautiful Kentucky Longrifles. Whether you agree with the right to own firearms in the USA or not, I think you will agree that to find such craftsmanship in today's age is a remarkable thing. Check out their story, and especially the picture gallery at http://www.housebrothersproject.com/home.html.

Usual question: all three brothers were born after the 1940 census. Can anyone figure out which family they belong to? We have over 500 people in our database with a Kentucky connection. So I am hopeful that we won't have to go back too far to connect them up.

South Australian BMDs
Another Guild member, David Squirrell, this month sent me several files where he had Howeses and Houses in his study. After I added them all in (thank goodness I had ten days away in Spain for the task!), he then sent me a file of Births, Marriages and Deaths from the South Australian files. Thank you, David. Now I've got yet another file to work on, which I may not get to for quite a while. Does anyone fancy taking on this file and trying to figure out a few families from it?

My visit to the UK National Archives
I grew up in the county of Norfolk, 120 miles NorthEast of London. Nowadays I live in Florida and come back to Norolk for the summer months. The UK National Archives are in the SouthWest of London, which might just as well be the far side of the moon from here. It's a four to five hour journey, by car or train, making a day trip an impossibility. However, my cousin Ian lives in Sutton about ten miles away and volunteered to put up with me for a couple of nights. So I got in two whole days of research. Thank you, Ian.

The National Archives has many images which one can download from the internet: things like wills, military service records and so on. Normally they cost £3.50 (about US$5) each but are free to download for visitors to Kew. Let's just say that I "saved" about £5,000! However, now I have armfulls (or arms full) of records to work through over the next few years.

I also tested the document ordering system. I pulled up the probate record for a John Howes who died in Shanghai in 1892. Probate was granted by "Her Britannic Majesty's Supreme Court for China and Japan at Shanghai". Who knew there was such a thing? Those were different days, huh?! Anyway, from that I was able to connect John to his daughter whose marriage we already had and to a son we hadn't known about. And, to return, it's just amazing that a single file like that can be found from 67 miles of shelving and delivered to a document window within 45 minutes of its being ordered - a rare example of government efficiency!

Finally, on my second afternoon, I was able to go to the LDS Family History Center, currently sitting at Kew and use their computers to find a few marriages from North East Suffolk that I had not previously known about. Super job. I'd like to go again, one day, but don't need to for a while.

Now, about that help . . . anyone fancy transcribing a few of those wills for us? They're in "secretary hand", which takes a couple of hours to get to grips with but after that relatively easy to read from the high quality pdf images. There's no rush at all. Work at your own pace and commit to doing two or three only, by all means. Every little helps.

Thank you for your continued support
Paul
richardhws
Posts: 4
Joined: May 1st, 2014, 11:12 am

Re: Going round the HOWZEs - September 2017

Post by richardhws »

Hi Paul
Many thanks for the huge amount of work you and your helpers have put in.
Particularly interested in the upcoming research for Oxfordshire where
my ancestors hail from.
Regards Richard Howes
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