Over the past couple of years, I've spent some time looking at one single stretch of the family tree which ran to the Kerbow name. It's an odd name....French in origin.
So, the story goes to this period around 1731 when some French Huguenots boarded a Dutch ship called the "Billender Townsend" out of Rotterdam, Netherlands. Jean Kerbo (spelled slightly different) boarded, and ended up in Philly.
The thing about this Huguenot group.....they'd lived in the Pfalz region of Germany for several decades....mostly because of religious persecution. A lot of this religious fervor that occurred, comes out of the Thirty Years War period (1619-to-1650 era). The war started originally between the reformers and the Catholics. Halfway through this war, the religious side of this conflict mostly ended and it became a single community opposing another community....mostly over revenge-killing.
The family arrived in Philly on 8 October 1731. What's generally said is that family united with other Huguenots in the Maryland region....going south into North and South Carolina over the next decade or two. By the 1860 period, one division of the family had moved into Minor Hill, Tenn. That's where my connection occurs.
The religious side of the family? If you go through things, this whole religious thing kinda 'dryed-out' after one generation in the US.
The original area of France? If you gaze at a France map....it's on the southeastern side...about forty miles south of Nancy, in a region called Haute-Saone....a county-like area that is about forty by forty miles, and mostly all farms. It's about a 20-minute drive to the Swiss border, and there's nothing urban there....this is pure farming territory today.
The population shift for Haute-Saone? Well, that's an interesting story. From mid-1800s to 2005...it was a dramatic shift....dropping from the 400,000 level in the 1800s to 210,000 by the end of WW II. Most of the shift? This was a pure farming area, and lots of people left for industrial jobs by the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
Today? You only find the Kerbow name around the US, to a smaller degree in Estongia and France. My guess is that the bulk of the family left in the 1600s/1700s, and some ended up in Estonia as well.
Added note: There are at least six different spellings to the name (Kerbo; Kerbow; Kirbo; Curbo; Curbow and Kuehrbeaux).
