I took a break from formatting books to step back and chart my progress. I am aghast at the proportions of the world we know as Babb. I’ve now completed 20 volumes totaling 9,650 pages and have a ways to go to get to the end…as if the world of Babb has limits.

I feel like I need to rename the series Babb Encyclopedia, but we are too far down the road for that!

One thing is for sure. This is the most extensive, most comprehensive, most exhaustive look at our family trees that has ever been conductive. Although I have worked on this personally for 20 years now, I still feel I owe a debt of gratitude to my predecessors, most of which did their work the hard way…before computers.

I’ve been able to leverage today’s technology to expand their work exponentially and without them I wouldn’t have even started this quest.

In 1999 I was starting my family research and couldn’t get out of the bayous of Louisiana. I found a Genweb forum for the Babb surname and noticed a large number of queries were answered with page numbers. Not being able to figure out what they were referring to I asked what the source document they were talking about was.

The answer came back as “The Babb Families of America”, which was commonly referred to as the Babb Bible. They provided an address and I ordered the book. My life has never been the same and I hope this series is the same for you.

I’ve since become Jean’s replacement in the Babb Family Association and have also incorporated the work of several other researchers such as Ian Henry Babb who did the same work as Jean in sorting out the Babb lines of England. Since almost all of us are of English origins this is exceptionally important.

Incidentally, I never met Jean or Ian, though I passed messages back and forth through the post and Ian’s sister Cherida. I also owe a debt of gratitude to her for taking me into her home and allowing me to scan almost 6,000 pages of Ian’s collected papers. In those papers we found a USB Pen Drive that contained Ian’s new method of organizing the trees he had discovered. The 69 trees he identified provided a foundation for the English lines in this work and allowed me to leap frog into action.

I know in my heart that Jean and Ian are standing next to Phillip, jumping for joy in the afterlife rooting us on to solve the biggest puzzle of our lives for we truly are on the verge of great discoveries.

Wherever you are, please raise a glass to Jean, to Ian and to all the other Babb genealogists that came before me.

Your work was not in vein!