I assume that there are a “few” new members who have got a PC for Christmas and have now found the Boyd@rootsweb.com net list and are thinking I will just wait and watch for a while. Well if you do that the rest of the List members will not know your family or what material you are researching. The benefit of any rootsweb.com Net list is that it allows to inform others of what your family is and what information you are looking for. It also allows to to discuss when you have brick walls how you might get around them in your research, so that other people might ask you have you looked at source A or B. There will be people on this list who have had the same problems as you now have, so advertising your problem will stop you form pulling out your hair and all you to advance your research in the correct direction. We do not know how many Boyds or Boyd descendants there are in the World today, or which Countries they might have migrated to. (If a Scotsman went there, you will most likely find a Boyd family.) We do know the Clan stated in 1111 A. D., according to King George II in 1746 when he executed the fourth Earl of Kilmarnock, William Boyd, in London. It is know that the Head of the Clan spans 28 generations and averaged 4.6 children. If they all had 5 Children, this means that by the mid 1600’s there were some 5 Billion – yes Billion – Boyds or Boyd descendants in the World. We only reached 7 Billion a few years ago. So if the Head of the Clan only had 2 children each that would represent some 128 million Boyds or Boyd descendants in the World today. The last time I counted the Boyds on my PC I had some 300,000 names. That might have now risen to 400,000. So you can see there is only a faction of the total Boyds known. While you wish to find a few hundred Boyds. Some of these will be known to members of this list while most will be new and you may be listing Boyds from a new location that no one on the list has seem before. So post your family to the list so you can advertise it to other list members. You can post in two ways. The first is the earliest know Boyd, along with their spouse and their children – along with as much details as you currently know, names dates and locations. The second way to post your family is to do a direct tree from yourself back as far as you can go and including the spouses name for each generation. Mike Boyd Chairman Historical Committee House of Boyd Society