The Beebe(y) Family Web Site - Introduction How it all started: My interest in family history began many years ago. Surprisingly little was known about earlier generations and there was the inevitable gossip and rumour, exageration and mis-information. What was the truth? The initial search was on my mother’s side (Beebe and Woollett) as here seemed the greatest mystery and the names were more unusual than “Sullivan” (my fathers side) which was too common to make searches viable at that time. My father was no longer alive, he died in 1976, and my mother was quite enthusiastic, so that is how it started. I have never been too obsessed about distant lineage. There is a lot of guesswork and false assumptions made by people who want a romantic past but I needed hard verifiable facts. I wanted to find out who my grandparents brothers and sisters were and to locate as many of their descendants as possible. For every generation that I could work back, it would lead to dozens (hundreds) more descendants. There were said to be twelve Beebe children in the family, all born between 1883 and 1907 but surprisingly little was known. I have since been able to determine what happened to all but two of them (very frustrating). There are three more, born prior to that date, that I am confident were from a previous marriage. Perhaps one day I will find out what happened to them as well. Working backwards and sideways I gathered a lot of information about Beebe / Beeby etc. and somehow the interest developed into a one name study of the Beebe(y) name. It now includes people from a number of countries around the world. Apart from the UK, there are many Beebe(y)'s in USA and I am in regular contact with others in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Historically these were the main areas settled. New information is always welcome. A word for our American cousins... Alan Henry and others in USA have already compiled a great deal of information about family members on that side of the Atlantic. Until recently, this web site tended to focus more on UK and the Commonwealth countries and Alan in particular “looked after” those of you the other side of the Atlantic. Alan passed away in 2011 and his daughter Lynda has entrusted me with Alan’s data which I have now (2020) made freely available on this web site in his memory. Link to Alan’s Data. I hope to include more material of interest to those of you who descend from the early settlers. There are some fascinating articles and links here already. Suggestions (support?) and articles please. There are now many web sites and organisations supporting and promoting family history research and unbelievable quantities of historic documents have been scanned and published on the internet. The consequence of all that worldwide effort is that web sites such as this one become much less significant, but there is still a place for us and our motivation is not financial! Information contained in these genealogy pages has come from a wide range of sources. Much of it is my own work which I like to think of as "original research" although, as is often the case, others may well have trodden the same path. We are all grateful to those of you who have generously and quite freely made your precious and time consuming research available for inclusion in these pages. That spirit of freely helping fellow family members interested in their historical roots is to be encouraged. Les Sullivan Near Cambridge, UK.