I have been reworking the profiles from most of Christiana's know siblings, now that I know how to do inline citations, rather than piling the sources in a heap below. What I found lately is:
1. The records for a number of her siblings confirm the name of their parents were James Babcock and his wife Mary _______. And these parents were both American born and specifically both born in Rhode Island.
2. Some unsourced forums say this mother Mary was born Mary Charles, but so far there is not a shred of evidence to support that, and Charles does not seem to appear much a surname in their region of Rhode Island in that time frame. So I think we should all remain open minded about the possible surname of mother Mary. Charles is not impossible, but could just be something someone latched on to and now a number of pedigree charts echo the name. Unless multiple of her children are wrong about her place of origin, I think we can rule out the idea of her being born in Barbados or the West Indies as has been proposed, though she could have had parents from there maybe.
3. Christiana's brother Henry (incorrectly called step-son in this G2G) was married for a long while to a woman named Freelove _____. He has just been incorrectly connected in marriage to Mary Ann Peckman who actually married a White guy named Henry W Babcock who is not Christiana's brother. I will disconnect that marriage if it is still connected after a few days.
4. Christiana's brothers James and Charles BOTH married Cecelia Remond, her of another influential Black abolishionist family. The Babcocks seemed to have learned the trade of barbering from the Remonds, though Christiana took the hair doctoring to a whole new level. James married Cecelia first, and after his death, Charles married her. Charles and his step-children are noted in census data as Indian, another corroboration that Christiana and her extended family were mixed race and at times self identified as (or were seen as) Indian. They grew up in South Kingstown, meaning in the Narragansett region of Rhode Island. The later 1881 Narragansett tribal list included some Babcocks, though not any of Christiana's immedate family to my knowledge. Many surnames from the list reflect the names of the old colonial founding families.
(Tribal list:
https://accessgenealogy.com/connecticut/1881-narragansett-tribal-list.htm)
p.s Just made a basic profile for one of Christiana's neices named Evangeline F. Babcock Gilbert. She's at Babcock-9037 if anyone wants to work on her.
