#3 Some background (P-1), as you most probably all know, is R. Bolling Batte's designation for the Poythress family. There are other families that get P-2, P-3, etc. Batte also uses P to number his publications, but that shouldn't confuse you too much. My goal is a trial compilation of the descendants of Francis Poythress and Mary, plus those of Mary and Robert Wynne, as they appear in the work of Mr. Batte. I only stray to other sources at this point in my work when those sources are solid, they move the project along, and where Mr. Batte was imprecise or confusing. This occurs infrequently. For me, this has been an exercise in understanding the relationship of many families of my personal tree. My primary goal has been to sort out the relationships and to attach the right index cards to each person and family. It is my hope that others can use the results for that purpose, but I would also hope that those searching for a connection to this family may get clues from their cousins of a similar time period. As it works out, I have taken a rather ambitious suggestion from Maynard to include a good bit of family information about the Epes (E-1), the Blands (B-1), the Bollings (B-2) the Randolphs, both (R-1) and (R-2), among others. The Battes, the family of the genealogist (who is a Francis Poythress descendant), are at times simply assigned numbers. However, the Battes after three generations often start getting letters as well as numbers. R. Bolling Batte is himself 148 317 521, but as a descendant of Amy Batte, my grandmother is 134 AEA CBA B. Each letter or number refers to the place in the family order in a particular generation. By counting the digits of letters, you can determine the number of generations. The space between three digits/letters is there only to help the reader. I am reminded in reviewing the frequent intermarriage of cousins during the Colonial period that Mendel and Darwin and all our current attitudes toward genetics have their genesis in the 19th Century. So far my software has managed to handle the loops from one intermarriage to the next, but the family is quite full of such loops. Not only that, it was quite common for siblings of one family group to marry several times into the sibling group of another family. In Batte's trial chart A he used numbers for the Poythress family, but it's clear from looking at thousands of cards that his preference in later years was the letter system. It is helpful particularly where children in the families exceeded 9 in number. It is sometimes tricky as my sense of the alphabetical order isn't as developed as my sense of number. My data base strives to contain descendants mentioned by Batte primarily of the 17th and 18th Centuries, and into the 19th Century. A few stray into the 20th Century. Diana