Putting our House in order - January 2019

Post Reply
mardler
Site Admin
Posts: 306
Joined: October 4th, 2009, 6:28 pm

Putting our House in order - January 2019

Post by mardler »

Happy new month, everyone. Apologies for the slight delay in receipt of this note but our Bulletin Board software is now very rusty and unpredictable. When I went to log in to draft my monthly newsletter it claimed not to recognize me, which is an obvious problem! We’re back on the road, at least temporarily, thanks to the assistance of my ISP. Is there anyone out there who fancies themselves at upgrading phpBB software? If you can, please help!

Hope you like the new title to our newsletters too. We’ve developed a tradition of cycling the title every couple of years going from “Howes That?” To “Howes it going?” to “Howes your father?” and most recently “Going round the Howeses”. “Setting your Howes in order” is the last obvious phrase I can think of involving a homophone or a pun. Can you come up with any others? You have two years!

RootsTech - Salt Lake City: Feb 27 - Mar 2
I have been sweating over my presentation every week or so taking another look at it and refining it. I’ve given that talk many times before and could probably do it blindfold, but RootsTech is the pinnacle as far as I am concerned, especially since I am among the first batch of presenters at 9:30am on Wednesday and will therefore have to set the tone for the conference!

Is anyone reading this actually going? If so, please do let me know. I would be very keen to meet up, just as I have met folks at UK family history conferences.

If you aren’t going, never fear. RootsTech is currently offering two choices for you:
1 - there’s a schedule of free live-streamed sessions here: https://www.rootstech.org/salt-lake/liv ... m-schedule. You can watch five sessions a day live online at rootstech.org. Remember that Salt Lake City is on US Mountain time, two hours behind New York and one ahead of California. If I could suggest just one session per day to watch, it would be:
Wednesday: Myko Clelland on using newspapers
Thursday: Kenyatta Berry on her slave ancestors
Friday: Amy Johnson Crow on making a proper plan
Saturday: Jonny Perl on DNA Painter. So many people have told me about this tool, but I’ve been too busy to look at it. I’ll be glued to this one!
2 - a virtual pass. It costs $129, but you get access to 18 presentations picked for you from some of the best presenters at the conference which you can watch on an electronic device at your leisure. See the full list of classes on this page: https://www.rootstech.org/salt-lake/virtual-pass-2019.

Son House 1902-1988
photo from Wikipedia
photo from Wikipedia
Son_House.jpg (467.42 KiB) Viewed 2486 times
Did you know one of our name was a Delta Blues player from Mississippi? Eddie James House, otherwise Son House, grew up in Mississippi and was very church-oriented. His parents separated and his mother took him to Louisiana. He married first at 19 but didn’t like his wife’s family or the farmwork. So he left them and began drifting. Rather than read my summary, go to his wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_House . Many of his recordings survive. Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5BiHw74xU or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdgrQoZHnNY. We’ve tried to find him in the census records and had to give up before we found all of them. If anyone would like to have a crack at extending what we’ve done, go right ahead! His record is here: https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename.

A Howes is leading Rugby into US professional sporting scrum!
Here’s a global news story from “down under” about how Rugby is moving in on the US. https://www.news.com.au/sport/rugby/we- ... 8fd58dc395
Very timely given the start of the big “6 Nations” tournament in Europe on Friday evening and with the Superbowl here on Sunday. The US has had a moderately successful Rugby 7s team for some years and in recent years has had more success, I know.
Dean Howes has some biographical information on Wikipedia, but he’s too young even to appear in the 1950 census when it comes out. Does anyone know who his parents were?

Thank you
Many thanks to those who responded to my request for support for our certificate buying program. Three correspondents (Netta, Jackie and Ann) have funded between them a total of 17 British certificates (usually marriage certificates) before the price increase this coming month. As usual I will match their donations. Using that and the balance of a generous “advance legacy” we had from Dave a while back we have already ordered over 100 certificates this month and I have another few I can buy with available funds.

Almost everyone of those certificates is answering a question and enabling us to join two part-families together. You might be interested to know that our file currently has about 3,150 such part-families in it. Some have several thousand people in them. Some have just a few and it is these which we are generally able to connect up with the help of a certificate.

The only frustration is that the mail service here in Florida is pretty bad. International air mail takes over three weeks from London! Oh, and finally in this section I should add that I should add that this morning, another correspondent, Richard, sent in a total of 31 certificates for his family alone. Thank you, sir.

Progress this month
In addition to buying all those certificates, we added over 1,800 people in January finishing on over 143,000 people. And in the course of preparing for my Rootstech, I happened to note that the GED file which we use to update the website and store all of our data in it, this month went over 5 million lines of computer code! Remember: ALL of that has been entered by hand over the last ten years or so!
Post Reply