Housework - February 2025

[mardler]

Hi folks. Happy new month. I hope you were able to see the spectacular planetary alignment this evening.

This is a very short note, I'm afraid. I've been back for only half the short month. There hasn't been much in the news this month about people with our name.

Thank you
I do want to say thank you to two of our correspondents:
- Sue, who continues to help us with Gloucestershire Howes, House and Howse families. She managed to find an extra marriage between two people already in our database: Frances Hall and Alfred Ernest Howes. They were actually first cousins, once removed. What made it even more interesting were: (a) both Alfred and his father, Frederick William, had rather fungible given names and surnames. Alfred sometimes reversed his and his father used either or both (b) this was Alfred's first marriage, in 1907 and it lasted less than two years, until Frances died in hospital. But, when he married in 1910, he claimed to be a bachelor, or at least the vicar wrote it in the register. So we would never have thought to look for an earlier marriage until Sue happened along. Who looks at banns registers? We normally do not unless we cannot find a marriage register. However, Sue did, and found that in the banns register, the vicar had written that Alfred was a widower. She even bought the marriage certificate for us to share, to confirm everything!
- Janice, in New Zealand, who has continued to produce lists of people from the New Zealand Government indexes of births and deaths, this month for Howes and Hows, surnames (with Howse yet to come). She annotates the lists with names of parents, spouses and children if she can find them. It's made my job of reconstructing families SO much easier. I've added almost 300 people from NZ this month and we now have over 1,200 with a connection to the place, with many more yet to add.
Thank you, ladies!

A note on cultural differences
I continue to hear people deprecate my adopted countrymen and women for (1) having lost the U in words like labour and colour, and (2) putting dates the 'wrong away around', i.e., May 20 instead of 20 May. My reaction is to send them back to Victorian parish registers where you will find practically all dates written in the format MMM DD and a significant chance of finding laborer instead of labourer!

To my mind it is the mother country that has likely changed its usage over time while the Americans held on to the standard way of doing things after they stopped being British!

I hear concerns from the UK too about cousins marrying, though it tends to be in the context of arranged marriages among immigrant families. It reminded me to check our database, because cousin marriage not unknown to us! We have 124 instances of cousins marrying, i.e., 248 people. I'd guess that there are likely a few more that we have failed to notice or label. Without actually looking at each one and doing an analysis, I suspect the reasons involve marriage among the better off in Britain in 19th century and before with a view to keeping property in the family, and marriage among small rural villages or communities of immigrants where few people moved around to find more distant 'talent'.

Our monthly progress
We added just over 700 people this month, finishing up on 219,666 people. As mentioned above, much of the action has been in New Zealand. From there, working back through family reconstruction we have joined up quite a few families with their English forebears, either directly or indirectly through Australia or in one case, South Africa! More to come this month, I expect.

Thanks for your continued support, folks
Paul