CHAPTER VTHE HOWES
The name of Howe is frequently linked with that of Hoge in the Southwest Virginia branch and the genealogy of the two is so related as to result in the Southwest Virginia Hoges being really more Howe than Hoge.
Governor Tyler, in writing of the wife of James Hoge, the progenitor of the Southwest Virginia Hoges, refers to her father, Joseph Howe, as first cousin of Lord Howe. That may be correct. There is, also, a tradition, which all writers have discredited, that Joseph Howe was a member of a family which had settled in Massachusetts and which there at an early time spelled its name "how" and which later added the "e," spelling it then as it appears at the time this history begins.
There is another version of the ancestry of Joseph Howe, and it seems to be the correct one – certainly as to the lineage if not as to the exact relationship. It serves to substantiate the connection of Joseph Howe with the Howes of the Anglo-Irish peerage and to declare the degree of kinship even if it does not establish it.
A note in the scrap book of Mary B. Luster, a niece of Eleanor Howe Hoge and a great-granddaughter of Joseph Howe, is one authority for this other version – that Joseph Howe was a brother of Lord Howe. The story from that note is that while quite a youth he ran away from England to join his brother, Lord George Augustus Howe, 3rd Viscount, who at that time was one of the English officers fighting in the French and Indian War. He arrived in America about the time that Lord Howe was killed at the Battle of Ticonderoga, and finding his brother dead, he drifted southward and finally settled at what came to be known as "Sunnyside," in Pulaski County, Virginia.
