About the Author: Why is a Vella researching the Houghtons
By
Charles J Vella, PhD, 2020 ©
How
is it that an immigrant from the island of Malta ended up compiling the
largest Houghton surname database? I was born on the island of Malta
and immigrated to San Francisco, CA, in 1950. I proudly graduated from
the University of California at Berkeley in 1977 with a PhD in
Psychology. I am now a retired neuropsychologist who got his
first IBM PC in 1982 in order to create neuropsychological test
scoring programs. My wife Marilyn Uran's great grandmother was Lydia
May Houghton of the Ralph Houghton line of Lancaster, MA. Her daughter
Imogene Morgan wrote a 500 page Houghton genealogy of her family in
1954; I read it soon after I got my computer. Her book lead me to John
Wesley Houghton's published 1912 Houghton genealogy, the first major
Houghton genealogy and to Marshall McClanahan's 1957 two typed Houghton
genealogy manuscripts.
But these books had no source citations and had been criticized for
errors. I got myself a simple genealogy program and entered everything
from four these volumes into the Houghton database. I then realized I
needed source citations, so I started inputting all of the New England
vital records that referenced the Houghton Surname at Sutro Library in
San Francisco. Many hours on microfiche research. I then decided
to do all of the US census data for every reference to Houghton and
Haughton head of households and family members (this only took 12
years!), but Ancestry.com had arrived by then. I created the Houghton
Surname Project Website in 1999. I use the Master Genealogist as my
genealogy program and Second Site as my website creation program. As
for those citatiation, the Project now has 118,000 individuals with
295,000 events and 557,000 citations. A well sourced genealogy. So that
is how a Maltese immigrant who is a neuropsychologist and a
computer nerd ended up compiling the Houghton Surname Project, the
largest Houghton source in the world. It is much more difficult to do
my Maltese genealogy which is mainly in Latin in church records. I also
loved being a clinical neuropsychologist at Kaiser Permanente Hosptial
for 35 years and carving pumpkins on Halloween.