For the newest members of our group welcome! We seek to define the earliest origins of all Babbs and are using DNA testing to help prove what the paper trail has not.
The “DNA Waiting Game” is a chance for the world of Babb to collectively hold our breath and await the long process of waiting for the DNA test results to come in. Normally I wait until I have the DNA test on order to make these announcements, but I am just too excited and won’t be able to sleep until I can share the news. I have recently made contact with a large number of Babbs from Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago and Costa Rico. They were all brought to me by this woman with the most angelic face, by the name of Darkie Babb. 
Don’t look for her or her family in the existing books because I’ve never had the opportunity to trade family trees with someone from this area of the world. So, I had nothing to go on other than the DNA results themselves, which don’t do you much good without a supporting family tree.
Long ago, a gentleman contacted me to join the Babb Surname Group who lived in the Island of Barbados. He didn’t match to anyone in our tree and his Y-DNA roots dated back to Africa instead of England as most in our tree do. As with most of our early DNA results I didn’t know how to interpret the data and it not being what I was looking for I didn’t follow up. I’ve always regretted that and once I realized that I was slowly building a repository of all the Babb lines on the planet I tried to reach out. But I’ve never been able to restore contact and think he may have passed away.
Like a ray of light, Darkie entered and brought me a number of connections that are great candidates. I’m working with them now to understand how the various people are connected to decide which of them to conduct a test on and help prove the connections.
This is the first promising lead for what looks to be a non-English line in the world of Babb and I’m so excited I could spit! #howvivid.
Please join me in thanking Darkie for coming into our lives to help solve this longstanding mystery!
I’ll post again when I have a suitable candidate who has explained their Babb lineage and also agreed to take the DNA test. Just in case you are wondering, we can only use Males who still bear the Babb surname on these tests. The Y-Chromosome is what is tested, which is passed along from father to son and dates back thousands of years. There are other types of tests available, but only this test will tell us how the surname connects into distant times.
2 responses to “DNA Waiting Game Teaser – Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago, Costa Rico Edition”
I found a record in the “Indentured Servitude” database at http://www.virtualjamestown.org (in their Bristol database) of a John Babb who left Commorford, Cornwall in 1659 as an indentured servant en route to Barbados via a mariner named Richard Roberts. His servitude was for 4 years. It’s the earliest record I’ve seen of Babbs in the Americas that aren’t linked to emigration through New England or the Thomas Babb group.
Indentured servants in those days signed up for a period of service in exchange for a lump sum of money or land (if they weren’t criminals or a color besides white). Interestingly, I found another reference to a John Babb in 1704 in a roster of land-renters in Nansemond Co, Virginia Colony. He owned 500 acres. It very well could be the same individual, who worked off his servitude and then emigrated to Virginia (though that’s totally speculation at this point. Five-hundred acres is 10x the amount granted in the early headright system). I imagine the eastern NC Babbs originated from the Virginia Colony/Jamestown area, trickling through Southampton Co, VA into Northampton, Halifax,Hertford and Chowan Counties in NC (among others. I’m from Halifax Co and my grandfather was born in Hertford Co.). There was a rush to colonize eastern NC in the early-to-mid 1700s and immigrants of the time did not generally come to NC directly, but through other more established colonies with nice, deep water ports.
It’s likely that the Babb surname in Barbados didn’t pass on through marriage or blood unfortunately, given the location and the state of the world during the time. I’m still looking into it, as I’ve come to a sort of dead end in my own Babb research, though it’s early on and I’m pretty stoked about it.
It was a pleasant surprise finding this page. Thanks!
-Jason
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32507/32507-h/32507-h.htm
http://www.virtualjamestown.org/indentures/search_indentures.html
Jason, what a great find! It at the very least establishes an initial theory that we could start from to help understand how the surname first arrived in Barbados. Sadly, the town name is misspelled, which they apparently knew at the time the index was prepared. Comerford is also a surname in use in England, so perhaps there is some connection there.
I see that Family Search has over 1000 baptism records online, so it isn’t a small branch we are dealing with. There is a timeframe gap from John to the other records so we may not be able to define an exact connection to him.
I’m going to restart this post and ask the various contacts we have to start giving me their family history so I can develop a tree for them.