Man about the House - June 2021

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

Man about the House - June 2021

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Hello everyone. Half the year has gone already, I'm afraid. For those of us North of the Equator, nights are drawing in already. Oh dear. England has many good things going for it, but summer here is so short. And the trend in Norfolk that I reported last month has continued: the wind continues to surge in off the cold North Sea. So most days the temperature has barely reached 15 in new money (59 in old Fahrenheit). Brrr. A good excuse to stay indoors and do genealogy!

Monthly progress
We added another 866 people to our file this month, finishing at 184,766 people. We've added people from all the major English-speaking countries: UK, US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc. I'm pleased to say too that I have reduced my email backlog significantly too!
One minor milestone we have passed this month is that the number of people named HOWSE in our database has surpassed 7,500.
And we may have hit a record, at least for other One-Name Studies. During the month, I came across a consecutive run of new fewer than 52 people named HOUSE in one census! It was in the village of St Barbe in Newfoundland in 1921. Staggering!

Howes in the news
Several items under this heading this month:
1 - Norfolk
The local newspaper in these parts, the Eastern Daily Press, carried an interesting news item the other day about Norfolk surnames, here:
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/norfolk-10 ... rs-8094322. HOWES was listed at #88 among the top 100, which prompted me to do a little searching. The data comes from the year 2014 on the Forebears website, which also has similar data for 1881.
In 1881, there were 1,300 or so people named Howes in Norfolk from a population of 338,000 making it the 25th most common name.
In 2014, there were only 1,100 people named Howes in Norfolk from a population of 913,000 making it now only the 88th most common name.

So, what happened? Did lots of us die off, or just not procreate? Not at all. Lots of us left, including me! The Norfolk Howes diaspora is now worldwide, as evidenced by the ancestral origins of many of our correspondents, from all continents. At the same time, British people are more mobile now than they were, meaning people move about a lot within the UK too. And in the last 50 years or so Norfolk's population has grown by 50%. So while the Norfolk population has fallen, overall in the UK, we have kept pace with the national increase in population, I believe. (I've been asked to make a presentation to the Local Population Studies Society in England on the topic of migration in October. So this topic is keenly on my mind and I may write more in the coming months. If you have any thoughts you'd like to share with me too, I'd love to hear them)

2 - a reverse mutiny on the high seas
This article popped up early in the month: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646 ... legal-case. Strictly speaking it's not "news" but it came up in my daily news feed. It's a gruesome story I hadn't heard before about a paranoid ship's captain in 1828 who murdered his crew before they could mutiny! One of the few who escaped and who subsequently gave evidence at the Captain's trial was a John Howes. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out who this John was. I read all the newspaper reports in the Irish press at the time but there was no hint of the man's origin, except that a month or so on, a Cork newspaper reported that a collection for John had raised £3 10s, including £1 from "his friend Mr O'Shaghnessy". So perhaps he was local to Cork or Cobh. Has anyone ever come across this story in their family?

3 - a dog auction
Raising and using sheepdogs is big business for British hill farmers and gave rise to the old BBC show "One man and his dog". Who knew how big, though? Jean Howes raised and trained Jess, who sold at auction for 7,200 guineas (£7,560, or close to US$10,000)! Read more at: https://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/bus ... am-record/

4 - a contract for Skyler Howes
We report fairly often on Skyler Howes, a talented American cross-country motor-cycle rider who competed around the world as a privateer. He now has a contract and won a stage in the Kazakhstan rally. https://dirtbikemagazine.com/skyler-how ... tan-rally/ Sad to relate, he had to retire later, however, and moved on to the next port of call in the racing circuit.

5 - a new golf course in Romania
if you have been through our list of Howes/Howse/House websites and businesses here https://howesfamilies.com/histories/feature5.php, you will have seen the wide variety of occupations in the world today and that we have a golf course designer in our midst: Jeff Howes. He has a new job in Bucharest: https://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/ ... in-romania#
By the way, if you know of a business or website owned by a Howes which is not on our list, please do let me know.

PUZZLE CORNER
Many thanks to those of you who wrote in about George William Howse and stimulated me into proper research. We uncovered lots more information about the man. Have a look at his record now, especially the source list at foot:
https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename

So, further stimulated by the interest and our success, here's another puzzle for you. It's very simple: we found a 1935 marriage between Ronald Howes and Vera Sanders, but couldn't figure out who they were. So we bought the marriage certificate. It's all transcribed for you here: https://howesfamilies.com/getperson.php ... ee=Onename
We learn that Ronald was in the RAF and lived in Essex, and that his father, Frederick, was a butcher.
And that's where we stopped! Can anyone figure out who these people were? I'm wondering whether perhaps Ronald was from another country in the Empire, as it was. Anyone recognize a Frederick Howes, butcher?

That's all, folks. Happy new month
Paul
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