Happy new month, folks. The sailing season is finally under way and the temperatures in Norfolk are gradually rising, though it's still chilly.
What I did last weekend
and will be doing most weekends is sailing my yacht, Melinda. Last weekend was the famed Three Rivers Race, run from Horning Sailing Club in the village where my house is. It's a 60-mile race along the narrow rivers and some of the broads themselves. There were 101 boats of widely-ranging sizes, two of them skippered by people named Howes, the other being my 4th cousin, Gary. During the race, we have to lower the mast and sails four times, to pass underneath bridges, one of which is 600 years old and very low, all while racing! The wind was strong this year and the 70 boats that didn't have gear failure finished in record times. Here is a selection of photographs taken by a friend of mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ladylouis ... 7405/page1. She does great work. If you are on Facebook, seek out a group called "The Three Rivers Race" where you can see many more photos, videos and stories from the race.
So I hope you can see why my focus is not always on genealogy! This weekend I'm off to a four day regatta, celebrating the extra bank holiday granted in celebration of Her Majesty's 70 years on the throne.
Meanwhile, in the rest of May
I had to take my wife to Heathrow airport and took the opportunity to visit the UK National Archives at Kew. In a day and a half, I was able to download 2,200 images representing 1,100 families, from the England and Wales 1921 census, for FREE. I started with the less frequent names, HOWS, HOWIS and HOWSE, and managed about one-half of those for HOUSE. There are thousands more images still to be done and I have had one volunteer who hopes to do more when his health improves enough to allow a visit. Anyone else who might be going to Kew who could download a few more for us?
So far, I've entered the information for HOWS and about half of those for Howse. I wish they were as quick to transcribe as to download! The results have been good. They have confirmed what we already knew about the families and added two or three families we hadn't previously encountered. Unfortunately, a few of the images I downloaded were themselves transcription errors, mainly for people named HOWE. There will probably be some of our names mistranscribed as Howe, but it is virtually impossible to search for them at present.
Overall, the 1921 census records are allowing us to be more accurate in our estimates of birth dates and places. And, we have noted the names of the employers and places of work of the individuals included. The 1921 census is already one of our top 40 sources.
We've also added 500 records from the 1950 US census. It's worth noting here that Ancestry.com has completed the indexing of the who census. I believe it is free to view on their site, as well as at familysearch.org. If you find your folks, do send me a link and I will add them in.
As of this evening, our database contains 195524 people, we having added over 900 people this month.
Wonderful free resource
I've no idea how I hadn't seen this site before now. It's a website dedicated to photographing the entire British Isles, that is, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The site owners have divided the land area into 281,000 squares, per the national grid. 13,500 people have submitted over 7 MILLION photos! It's an actual treasure trove. You can find pictures of villages where your ancestors lived, local landscape features, churches where they celebrated life events, war memorials, and so on . . . and so on. Simply amazing. Just go to https://www.geograph.org.uk/ and search for yourself. Have fun!
A lasting legacy
When David Stewart Howes, a Canadian businessman, died, back in 2015, we noted the fact in our newsletter. His name came up this month when the Niagara Community Foundation, to which David had made a huge donation, made a large grant to create a sports training centre in his name. Few of us are fortunate enough in life to leave a lasting legacy. I'm sure his family must be very proud of the continuing benefit that his legacy is providing to the community. To read more, go here:
https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/spo ... letes.html
Thanks for your continued support, folks
Paul
Man about the Howes - May 2022
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