Hello. Welcome to the HOWES one-name study. We have four fundamental aims:

• to help individual family/clan members break through brick walls in their research
• in particular, to help emigrant families trace their home coutnry roots, most notable of which is to establish the English roots of Thomas Howes, who emigrated to America in 1637
• to bring together HOWES / HOUSE / HOWS / HOWSE / HOWZE families from around the world, and add to the sum of knowledge about our family names
• to examine whether there are common roots between the four study surnames

If you are willing to help, or just lend your support, please do visit us at our study website.

• the surname comes from Southern England, and more particuarly from the chalk/limestone hills of Southern England, from Norfolk, NorthEast of London, down the Chiltern Hills and West to the Cotswolds, thence around Somerset to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to Hampshire and Sussex.
• each of the areas dominated by one of the variant spellings fits neatly against each of the others.
• this pattern still existed in 1891, just after the point where spellings were pretty much established because most people could read and write. We expect that maps made from earlier censuses will show an even more distinct pattern.

So we conclude that our name mainly derives from the Saxon word Hoo meaning hill and has simply been pronounced differently in each place due to the heavy regional accents in Southern England. Educated people such as clergymen wrote the names down slightly differently in each place and those spelling distinctions have stayed in place.  Recently, we have become aware of a village just outside of Cambridge, England named Howes, f1rst recorded in the year 1219, which is the first evidence for a locative origin of our name.

In North America, at least, many immigrants' names were anglicized during the immigration process. So there are a considerable number of us who are descended from people with names like Hau, Haus and Huizen mentioned above.