Robert Crabb

Robert Crabb stands at the top of this line, and almost everything we can say of him is what the Littleport registers say of his family. On 30 May 1710 he married Mary Greene; between 1711 and 1726 they baptised four children at Littleport — Christopher, Anne, Robert, and lastly William, who carries the line — and the baptisms of Anne, Robert and William survive in the indexed registers today, each one reading 'parents Robert and Mary Crabb'. Of Robert himself — his baptism, his parents, his burial — we assert nothing yet, and the reason is not absence but abundance: the Littleport registers of his generation hold at least four Robert Crabbs at once, married to a Mary, a Martha, an Isbell, a Sarah, an Anne and an Alice between them, alongside households headed by Christopher, Clement, Thomas and William Crabb. The clan was old in the parish before our first certain record of it, and the freeholders' list of 1753 — Christopher, Pepper, Bennet and William Crab — shows its standing a generation later. Somewhere behind the 1710 wedding lies another century of Littleport Crabbs; which of them was Robert's father is a question the parish registers alone cannot answer, and we leave it open rather than guess. What is certain is where this family begins for us: at the font and the altar of St George's, Littleport, in the reign of Queen Anne, on ground the family then held in its own right.