I had a dickens of a time figuring out who this Babb family was that traced back to Kansas and thought I’d share these newly reclaimed photos from their album.
The album is one of my eBay finds and the lot of 9 photos was sparsely marked. Lots of first names and locations that didn’t match to the database. The best clues were that of what appeared to be J.C. Babb Jr. We knew the family to be from Kansas because of the various photographer stamps from Coffeyville and Fredonia, KS. But there were also stamps from Coatesville and Lebanon, PA. There is a Grandfather Smith (which is an astoundingly useless bit of information). Most the pictures are of children and full names were absent except for a Dorothy Quincy Babb. There was no apparent family unit, other than the 3 children, but they never once appeared with the parents in the photos.
I thought that surely with a name like Quincy as part of my search it would be very easy to search on her and I’d be on my way in a matter of minutes. #Fail.
Not having the first name of J. C. Babb Jr proved an impossible task and no matches came up in the cities of Fredonia or Coffeyville. Theoretically, I would have found J. C. Babb Sr somewhere nearby and there was just nothing.
I took a shot in the dark with one photo of J. C. that had his date of birth on the back side along with the location of Coatesville, PA. The picture is of a very young boy.
I should inform you at this point that for me to take the search to Pennsylvania means that I was super desperate. Pennsylvania is where the Bavarian Babb’s settled in the US. I’ve never had to opportunity to meet one of their descendants, but records are a hot mess and I dread trying to figure out the manifold John, Johan and Johannes combinations which shift from record to record (the secret is that it’s all the same person and they just give out a different variation of their name whenever they’re asked. Plus, with no members of the Association as part of their tree it is very hard to justify spending much time on the line.
Now, you never know when you are working through photos like this if some of the pictures are from outside the immediate family. They could have been sent by a Cousin and that can really throw your theories out of line. So, you have to move very cautiously with any assumptions.
In Coatesville I was finally getting Babbs to work from. I worked on tracing a James C Babb and that looked promising, but when I discovered his date of Birth he wasn’t a match. It was getting very late in the night at this point and I was bleary eyed when I came across a Thomas C Babb Jr that had the same birthdate as our J.C. Babb Jr in the picture.
After a few seconds of disbelief I returned to the photo and looked at it again to find that the “J” in question was actually a “T”. It was a flourish of the writing of the time that deceived me for the last 2 hours.
Still in disbelief I started working on Thomas’s documentation to help shape out his family unit and the pieces started falling in place quickly.
So, without further delay, let me introduce you to the Thomas Clark & Marie “Matie” Corwin (Smith) Babb Jr family:
3 responses to “Kansas Babb Family”
Nice blog! I recently purchased a photo of J. C. Babb dated 1889 and he’s wearing his Sheriff’s badge in the tin type
Dorothy Babb was my paternal grandmother, so I was delighted to discover these photos!
My father, Louis, used to spend his summers in Fredonia and adored his grandparents, Marie and Thomas.
I’ve always wondered how Marie came to be born in Idaho. I lived in Idaho myself while in high school and was fascinated to hear that she had lived there as well.
A great find, this page! Thomas Babb’s wife, Marie Corwin Smith, is my great grandaunt; both passed away the year I was born(1953). I know little of the Smith family, but I’ve been trying to collect photos and documents for my Ancestry.com site. Marie Corwin Smith’s great granduncle was Thomas Corwin, Ohio politician whose positions included being Lincoln’s ambassador to Mexico during the Civil War. Her father, John Quincy Smith (my g-g-grandfather) left Ohio as a physician onto Idaho to farm, then onto Kansas and became a businessman in Fredonia. Your photo of him with granddaughters is the only one I have of him. Any other info on the above is most welcome – Thanks! (J.L. Drouhard, Tacoma, WA. My grandmother was Meredith Smith; my mother was Patricia Price – all of Fredonia, KS)