Abraham is the man that my English predecessor Ian Henry Babb believed to be the immigrant ancestor of the Newfoundland Babbs. There are a series of badly disjointed record fragments that point to his repeated presence in the area that were collected by someone on the island. However, the repository is a long series of single line entries without any source information.

Due to the strike on the Public Records Office in Devon during WWII, information about Abraham was all but wiped out. I’ve never found in Ian’s notes on the matter and there is only a letter he wrote to one of our members that bears the belief but provides no context as to why.

His collected papers do not appear to contain a single mention of the name Abraham.

But a source came to light quite accidentally last night when I was changing a query on Newspapers.com. I had the results sorted in chronological order and I just put in the name Babb with no other context. I had not known that The Daily Gazetteer was in publication as early as 1700. It’s a testament to this city’s immense size that it was able to support a paper that was labor intensive for more than 114 years before the invention of the Steam-powered printing press.

Regardless, I FINALLY have some potential dates for the possible forefather of the Newfoundland Babbs!

These are my initial findings for Abraham Babb who captained the ship Kenwood in the 1730s:

This is how all of that translates into a chronological history along with other details we had about him already from Newfoundland and a few others that were discovered along the way.

Could this be the ancestry of Thomas Babb, who married Maria Palmer and together they birthed at least 3 children on the island of Newfoundland?

It certainly has all the hallmarks of a connection to the Lions of the Sea (DNA-01). They had ships, we know the Y-DNA matches, and we can see that Abraham made a number of trips to Newfoundland.

I wish we could look at the records. But in this cold, once desolate, place there was no record keeping. Whatever there was were just fragments of the true story of the great windmill of Babbs that came to and from this Island over more than 2 centuries.

Records continue to present themselves all the time as places like Ancestry and Family Search work to use artificial intelligence to scour their existing databases in an attempt to create a every word index of them.

Those efforts are constantly yielding hints beyond our wildest dreams less than 10 years ago. It is from those word indexes that I’m bringing you most of what I have shown in the last few months. I still review each record to make sure it passes my sniff test as to whether the record is relevant.

I don’t have any more to report about Abraham today, but you never know what tomorrow will bring. If nothing else, we are that much closer to our understanding of how the Babbs of Newfoundland established a permanent residency on this Island.

This story is not at an end, but merely in a state of suspension. As new information comes to light, I’ll share it with you!