The West Midlands is a metropolitan county, or in other words a city that is also a county. In 2014 the West Midlands boasted a population of 2,808,356 and stood as the second largest county in England. If you think about it for just a moment you already know which county outranks it. The city of Birmingham lies within the West Midlands, as do Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton (the city with the cutest name ever!). All of these places figure prominently into the attached pedigrees. I don’t know Ian Babb’s (pictured) motivation for setting these apart from the Babb lineages of Staffordshire, but I wanted to preserve his work and not mess with the political boundaries.
All of these locations figure prominently into the 3 Babb lineages we find here. There was a forth, but under closer examination it was a duplicate of one of the previously published lineages in Staffordshire. This isn’t really a surprise as the West Midlands was founded in 1974 from parts of Staffordshire County. So, the two are inextricably linked despite the modern naming conventions.
Speaking of names, two of them stuck out to me while pulling the pedigrees together. Phoebe & Job. These names are common in some of the Staffordshire Pedigrees I listed earlier this week, but are virtually unknown to the other Babb lineages outside of the area. It was these names that allowed me to formally pull together the duplicate tree I mentioned earlier, though the exact connection proved elusive on the others. Think of them as one in the same tree, which they most likely are.
The 3 remaining lines of Babbs in the West Midlands are:
- west-midlands-pedigree-01 (about 1791 in Willenhall, Staffordshire)
- west-midlands-pedigree-02 (before 1782 in Walsall, Staffordshire)
- west-midlands-pedigree-03 (about 1756 in Willenhall, Staffordshire)
For those of you who have been following this project, you will know that alphabetically I’m finished. But I had earlier bypassed the great county of Devon, knowing that its sheer mass and complexity would have overwhelmed me in the early stages of this project. Knowing that nothing could be worse than the Jeffrey mess of Staffordshire, I now head to the South West corner of England to visit what is believed to be the most ancient of Babb locations. Thus far I’ve completed 10 counties, 34 new pedigrees, 2952 new members to our tree. But I’ve just passed the halfway mark in the total number of pedigrees. There are 31 in Devon alone. Some will be big and hopefully some will be small. It could be a folly, but it’s gonna be fabulous!
I’m off! (Totally!!)