Set your sights on the next destination in our collective Babb journey. I’ve spent a good bit of time working my way through England looking for connections through The Lions of the Sea. But for the next few weeks I’ll be focusing in the southeastern parts of Virginia and the connecting lands in the northernmost parts of North Carolina.

This is the territory of the group we know as the Great White Stags that wanders through the forests of the area taunting us with mysteries to which there seem no answers. This Stag is more elusive that the Sasquatch! We will attempt to find him as we journey through the paper and DNA records.

I have a copilot for this journey in the form of one of our members named Travis who descends from one of these lines.

Problem Statement:

The idea of a cohesive lineage falls off the windowsill into the abyss when discussing this lineage. Unlike other trees in the US, my predecessor, Jean A. Sargent did her best to keep the units together with a piecemeal system that included a good number of placeholders. They were used to keep the lines that were obviously connected, but for which there was no conclusive paper trail to assist in the journey.

Records prior to 1850 are few and far between. Many were destroyed by the Civil War and to complicate matters even further the state we know as North Carolina once encompassed all of Modern-day Tennessee as well as an upstart state which was named Franklin.

Franklin eventually failed and the territory again became part of NC before finally becoming part of TN. This was the fate of the 1787 Seth Babb Homestead which has been located in 3 different states despite never having been moved (until recently).

So, gird your loins. We are jumping into the single biggest set of unknowns for Babb(s) in the US that still remains for our collective surname.

Let’s go!