Once again, I fell I must apologize for using the term Metropolitan for these often tiny hamlets are are journeying through. We have stumbled upon yet another large Babb encampment. The eldest record in this collection is the town of Highweek. Searching in the area we come across records in Bishopsteignton, Bovey Tracy, Chudleigh, Combeinteignhead, Dartington, Dawlish, Hennock, Highweek, Ideford, Ilsington, Lustleigh, Widecombe in the Moor. These 12 place names contain 130 records in all.

This area greatly overlaps the area from a recent post I made titled: This Week’s Stops: Totnes & Newton Abbot Greater Metropolitan Area – Babb Unabridged. It shows the difficulty in working with places you for the most part have never been to. But it also shows the population density of the Babb lines in this area. The two population centers in this set of records is in Chudleigh and Dawlish. Both are already known to the Master Tree but only contain 28 & 12 people thus far.

On the very first record I was treated to the knowledge that the center of Highweek is a 7 minute walk from the center of Newton Abbot. I couldn’t help but laugh. I knew there was some overlap but the manual process I’m using didn’t catch it on the first time. The result of this was immediately clear as I was able to join the first Highweek record for Richard Babb into another Newton Abbot tree by the formal name “Devon Pedigree (Newton Abbot 1568)” which predates the tree we were talking about in my post for Colyton. So, the good news is some of these records are starting to come together!

Other than that, nothing remarkable came of importing these additional records, except that I was able to match up a good number of records to entries that previously had no sources.

Much more work will have to be done at a later time to try and identify any connections between this very tightknit set of communities.