Man about the Howse - November 2022

[mardler]

Hello everyone. Happy New Month! Because I write my newsletter at the end of each month, it’s really easy to forget about holidays still three or four weeks away and fail to send best wishes to people with holidays three of four weeks hence. That’s exactly what I did last month. So I hope everyone in North America had good Thanksgiving holidays with family and/or friends whether last week (US) or last month (Canada). I had a lovely break with my younger son and daughter-in-law in Massachusetts from where I’m returning to Florida tomorrow afternoon. It’s very difficult to forget December’s holidays, though! Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas and Happy Everything Else.

Harmless historical fun
I'm not going to do more much more than point you in the direction of this wonderful website and let you have the fun! Basically, you can submit a few photos of yourself and receive back in return many images of you in historical poses, courtesy of MyHeritage and their Artificial Intelligence. There are more variations than I can describe. But from what I see from friends posting the results on Facebook, there is much mirth to be had. Have at it!
https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/11/int ... s_email

Special thank you to our contributors
I want to say a big thank you to the three people who stepped up in response to my appeal for funds last month and the one extra person who said they would buy two certificates directly for us. Between them, the four people live in four different countries! I have matched their donations and will order some certificates to arrive in time for Christmas. I should say that our money is now able to go farther than it used to. Not only are electronic certificates available from England and Wales at £7 for some births and deaths rather than the £11 for a normal certificate, but I’m participating in a trial program which for many births and deaths provides merely a copy of the register entry for a much further reduced price of £2.50. Unfortunately, most of our budget goes on marriage certificates! Anyway, if you would also like to contribute, please do let me know.

Scottish news
Although our surname originates in Southern England, there are several House and Howes families in Scotland. We would love to do more work on our Scottish brothers and sisters and even drop some of our funds on certificates. However, it is a very expensive proposition. The Scottish government keeps census, church and civil records close to their chest on a single website: scotlandspeople.gov.uk. The only way to avoid paying to view every single record is to spend time at the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh, not an easy trip.

Why mention this now? Well, this very morning, on St Andrew’s Day, the Scots released their version of the 1921 census. It’s the most recently taken census available to the public – their 1939 Register has not yet been released. One of my friends in the Guild bought a record this morning, which had a Howes family on it, and sent me a copy. (You know who you are! Thank you.) It’s quite different from the England and Wales release. The Scottish version looks like, and probably is, the enumerator’s summary sheet from a traditional census, whereas the E&W version contains the individual household declarations.

As I write this, I have an idea: I’m wondering whether there is anyone reading this who lives close enough to Edinburgh that they might be willing to spend a few hours downloading some images for us. Is there anyone, pretty please?

Howes in the news
Five Generations in one shot
A consequence of our aging society is that w are more likely to find multi-generational photographs. In my own family, just a couple of years ago we had four generations of women in the same picture, But I was amazed earlier this month to see a five-generation picture: a whole Howes family in the UK Daily Mirror. Amazingly, the men have all grown up in the same house, in Portsmouth in Southern England. Read all about it.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/f ... d-28390494

Your town gives you your own special day, named after you
You all know about Skyler Howes. I've written about him often. His home town of St George, in Utah named a day after him, How cool is that? Can't have been too many of those, right?
https://www.thecheckeredflag.co.uk/2022 ... howes-day/

Our monthly progress
We added over 1,500 people this month and now have just over 202,000 people in our master file.

Let's have some more fun to close
This was spotted earlier today by our team of crack researchers in Leicestershire. Legacy.com is an obituary aggregator. They pull together obits from all manner of sources and put them all in one place, very handy for people like us. We give them the surnames we are interested in and they even send us a daily email. This all happens automatically, with no manual intervention, after some clever programming. Unfortunately, the programming is not quite perfect. Here's the one that arrived today in our feed for the name House:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/na ... z-obituary
Laughter is not normally the correct response to an obituary but, go ahead, make an exception!
[Editor's note: unfortunately, the good folks at Legacy have since spotted the error and have taken the page down]

Thanks for your continued support, folks.
Paul