Putting our House in order - April 2020

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

Putting our House in order - April 2020

Post by mardler »

Happy new month, folks. One third of the year gone already! With all this virus lockdown it feels like two-thirds, already! It turns out that the lockdown has been a huge stimulus to people re-opening their family history research. My email inbox bears eloquent testimony to that because it has exploded with enquiries.

Welcome to our new correspondents
Glad we've been of some help to you. If you can add anything to what we are holding on your family, we'd love to hear more. Here's a quick list of things we like:
- pictures of House/Howes/etc people or ceremonies
- pictures of houses or other relevant places, like churches
- pictures of gravestones (not ones from FindaGrave, though - we respect their copyright)
- copies of certificates
- dates and places of life events
- any reminiscences about individuals no longer with us
- transcriptions of wills
- obituaries
- any kind of fact that we cannot pick up from the usual sources we use. For instance we learned yesterday of a man who was a noted author in his field, pigeons, but we would never have known that without having been told.
Regarding research, we are interested in anyone with our surname(s) or their children or grandchildren, though for reasons of space we only publish actual images for people with one of our names.

Month-end report
With all the extra correspondence, we had quite a busy month, not that we ever have a quiet one! We added over 1,300 people to finish with 50 or so people above 168,000 in our file. Some of our longer-term projects have had to take a bit of a back seat. We added only 2 pages from the book, Howes Genealogy, for example, though we did restart the process of looking at Gloucestershire wills and catch up on a little on past correspondence there. As a result we have connected the Howes/Howse and Millington families and disclosed the reason why several of the latter ended up changing their surnames to Howse. John Howse died and left his vast fortune mostly to John Howes Millington on condition that he change his name. So he became John Howes Millington Howse!

Free Stuff
Sometimes during a month, I learn of a website offering free access for a few days. I wish I could pass these on but I'm only allowed to send out one of these emails every week or so via our free service. If it happens to co-incide with a month end, of course I include it. Anyway, the lockdown is also causing some websites to offer material for free that ordinarily one might have to pay for:
- British History Online - https://www.british-history.ac.uk/ - offering lots of free content until July 31, 2020. If anyone would like to pull out some Howes/etc material, that would be great.
- UK National Archives - normally charges £3.50 for a download of an old will, or naval service record, or a few other things. Those downloads were free to anyone visiting the archives, and I took full advantage of everything when I visited there a couple of years ago. So I'm not as interested in help from here, but you may find gems from elsewhere in your own family ancestry. Check out: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/abo ... downloads/
- here's a wonderful free site where you can actually see the distribution of many UK surnames change over time: https://gbnames.mappingdutchman.com/. I really like this one, though it doesn't help with day-to-day research, of course.
- keep an eye out for free offers from Ancestry and FindMyPast, especially with the 75th anniversary of VE-Day coming up.
- not quite free but very good value indeed: post 1855 UK wills are still discounted to only £1.50 each. See:
http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine. ... -12-months and linked pages.
If anyone has any wills that they've bought through this process, we'd love a copy! The discount expires in July this year but I suspect it may be extended.

Howes in the news
- Man beats virus: we've probably all seen videos of people being clapped by hospital staff on their way out, having survived a bad dose of the virus. Well, at least one of our own has recovered: Ken Howes of Yorkshire. See his story in the local newspaper here:
https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/183848 ... ronavirus/ Our congratulations go to Ken and his family, at least one of whom is reading this!
- Howes Hall of Fame: who knew about this?! It's a Hall of Fame started by the good folks at Howes Lube, whose t-shirt we featured some months ago. Their products are closely associated with the trucking industry and they started the Hall of Fame to mark their centennial. Good for them, and goodness knows how this crisis has caused us all to realize how much we depend upon truckers to maintain our daily lives. Here is the news item covering their very first inductee into the Hall of Fame:
https://www.thetrucker.com/trucking-new ... ll-of-fame
And here is the virtual Hall of Fame itself: https://www.howeslube.com/HOF
- Jon Howes, now the longest-standing member of the Chippendales! We featured him a few years back in a picture with Mariah Carey. Personally, I am not a big fan of men's abs (mine are a little 'obscured'!) but I know some people are. So for you and anyone interested in what a dancer has to say in a deep interview: https://ravermag.com/revues-that-rave-i ... ppendales/

Passwords on our site
I just wanted to say that I learned something about the software that runs our website recently. Sometimes people have a problem with their password. There is a button that can be used to change it, but not everyone has that button, because until recently I didn't know it was there. So if you are having a problem logging in, let me know and I'll put you in full control. It's just too time consuming to go through over 1,500 records and make sure the appropriate button is checked!
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