Putting our Howse in Order - December 2020

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

Putting our Howse in Order - December 2020

Post by mardler »

Hello everyone. We've reached the end of another year, and in the case of 2020 who will be able to forget it? I'm sure we all hope for better things in 2021.

As I said at the end of last month's newsletter, I hope you were able to get some family time in. My wife and I braved the virus (and the weather!) and drove 1,300 miles from Florida to Massachusetts to see my newly-wed younger son and his wife, and help them move into their first house in a couple of weeks. Massachusetts demands that newly arrived visitors take a virus test; both my wife and I were negative, thank goodness.

An election-free zone?
For the past two months I have said that our newsletter would be an election-free zone. I totally forgot to mention that we had TWO of our number, Steve House from Colorado, and Ted Howze from California. standing for election to the US House of Representatives. Unfortunately for them, they both lost, gaining only 40% and 45% of the votes in their respective districts.

Now, I've been racking my brains trying to think of other national level politicians with our name and I've come up with only two:
- John Ford House, who was a Congressman from Tennessee from 1875 to 1883
- Edward Howes, who was a Member of Parliament for Norfolk East in England from 1859 to 1868
Both men were lawyers, as it happens.

Question: whom have I missed? Given our numbers I do find it a little surprising that there have been only two, and not one for almost 150 years. Surely I must be missing somebody . . . . Do you know anyone?

House/Howes/etc, in the news
Amazingly enough, there was precious little in the news concerning people with our name in December, though I did find this interesting piece, on Skyler Howes, the motor-cycle rider who manages to compete with the professional teams despite no major sponsorship. Read the piece and you will find that this man has real guts! Even if you don't fancy reading the whole piece, just look at the action photographs!
https://advrider.com/ned-suesse-intervi ... ler-howes/
As I was finishing up this note, I received word via my daily Google news feed that Skyler is currently lying ninth in the Paris/Dakar rally, and also this following heart-warming story about a Howes woman who has been going through very hard times both personally and professionally.
https://fox8.com/news/willoughby-busine ... dia-sales/
If you live anywhere near Willoughby, Ohio, do consider stopping by her store, or taking a look at her website: https://www.itssoyouboutique.com/

Some statistics from our study
We finished the year with 178,776 people in our study, having added just over 1,000 people in December. There are very nearly 875,000 different facts associated with them. Remember, almost all of our data has been added by hand!
Over 50,000 of those people are hidden from view because of our confidentiality guarantee
The size of our GED database now exceeds 124 Megabytes!
We try to note situations where cousins marry, just out of interest. It's a practice that happened a lot in relatively closed communities and among the landed gentry in England for keeping property in the family. We have 181 instances of the phrase in our database. The odd number of occurrences indicates that either we have missed one or someone did it twice!
That got me thinking and I came up with the following table to note marriages among people with our name: a total of 357!
Marriages.JPG
Marriages.JPG (16.39 KiB) Viewed 2177 times
There are one or two more than this, because I didn't look at Howze, Hows or Houze, and there are one or two instances of men marrying their deceased brother's widow, who would have had a different maiden name.
We also have 21 instances of people either marrying bigamously or potentially doing so! One of them, you may recall, married no fewer than seven times, he being Joseph Thomas Leslie Howes.
We now know the identity of both partners of 25,640 marriages out of a total of 33,400 in England and Wales from 1837 to 1980.
We have 18 sources that we have cited over 10,000 times each! One of them, the birth record from the national index of England and Wales being cited over 162,000 times! Citations to the national death index will exceed 100,000 in the next few weeks.
We have within a few of 4,000 images on our site . . . . and we are always looking for more! Certificates are very welcome as are photos of people, grave markers, houses, shops, or almost anything else relevant to
We have almost 50 places that we have used over 1,000 times each, the most popular being Norwich, Norfolk with over 9,000 citings!
We have over 1,570 correspondents, most of whom have shared portions of their House/Howes family relationships with us. Do you have any updates for us in respect of events that have happened sine we last corresponded?

All the best for 2021. Thank you for your continued support
Paul
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