There has been much hullabaloo over the years about a missing link in the paper trail of Bathsheba Hussey’s royal ancestry. I am finally able to put that story to rest with the presentation of the document that has evaded us all this time.

For a little background in 1994 my predecessor, Jean A. Sargent, included Bathsheba’s Royal lineage in the Appendix of her Book “Babb Families of America” in both the 2nd and 3rd Editions on pages 560-561. It was, by comparison a frail little line that only ran back to 420 AD. It was all that she could fit on 2 pages.

Jean never used a computer and did all of her research by hand (aka. the hard way). She did use an electric typewriter, but that was as far as she was willing to go. During WWII she worked for a division of the Department of Defense that was in charge of breaking the communication codes used by the German Military. She tackled Genealogy with the same zeal and was a stickler for details and documentation and would regularly reject submissions based on a lack of sufficient detail. On this, she and I are very much alike. The integral structure of the tree must be maintained, and one cannot rule by consensus here as it isn’t always achievable.

So, when I attempted to find the documentation behind it, I was surprised not to find anything in her notes. There is one box that is missing from her research that is stuffed in an attic in New England, but I don’t know what is in it. Regardless, I set about doing the research myself and found two books at the Dallas Public Library that unveiled almost all of the connections for me.

Burkes Peerage and Burke’s Landed Gentry provided about 600 of Bathsheba’s grandparents. But there was just a single record that could not be accounted for. It was a great matter of disagreement as to whether the info should remain in the tree given that there was no proof on file.

After careful consideration, I decided that just because I hadn’t seen the record in question, didn’t mean that Jean didn’t. If she agreed to put it in her book, that was good enough for me to leave it there. I noted that the connection was in question as part of the record, which is the appropriate method of documenting such a dispute. I went on my way and about a dozen years passed.

We located a US descendant of Christopher Hussey, who had the paper trail to support it and worked with him to get a Y-DNA test completed. As I mentioned earlier, that didn’t provide us any guidance at all because there wasn’t a single match to his DNA in the database.

Then, one day, sometime after the Covid Lockdowns started, I was having some success with locating additional records using FamilySearch.org which is a non-profit site run by the Mormon Church. Their collections extended beyond what Ancestry.com had to offer and I was using my new technique on the Babbs of London & Essex.

Depressed about the lack of a Y-DNA match for our Hussey candidate but emboldened by my newly found search skills I took another chance at trying to find this missing record. I was able to narrow the focus of my search to just Surrey, where the proposed parents were known to live. I must have tried 3 dozen different searches, omitting a variety of information from each search to get a different set of results.

I can’t say that I recall what I searched for that revealed the record. I went back and tried to figure it out and failed. It was as if the Internet gave up this record for just an instant and then swallowed it back up. Fortunately, I had the sense to immediately save the record to my local computer.

The old English makes it hard to read, but here is the entry. Note that it is just the first line. It reads:

18 [Feb] Christopher Hussey Son of John bapt.

Also, here is the entire page. Christopher’s entry is near the bottom left side. Look for the 18 in the first column.

So, that’s it. The line is completely documented now. So, for the first time, please let me present to you the fully documented ancestry of Bathsheba Hussey. Get some coffee before you decide to read it as it is 297 pages in length. It’s no longer that frail little line that was first presented in 1994.