Hi Bill, I may be the McKeand/MacKeand that you've seen posting on the list. You are correct in thinking that it is a Wigtownshire name; it is mentioned as such in at least two of the older works on the area that I'm aware of. One of those is M'Kerlie's late 19th century book on the lands and landowners, and you'll find extracts of that in the web site "Wigtownshire Pages". Another was the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, which was published about 1800 and an article on Wigtownshire mentions the name. The early history is however very thin. I've been able to take the name back to the late 1600s, though without a very strong linkage before the mid 1700s. The place with the strongest McKeand associations is Penninghame, and there's some backup for saying that Barsalloch (a farm on the river road from Wigtown to Newton Stewart) was their center. County Down is next door, with just the "Sheuch" in between and clearly many families have moved in both directions, but I've not seen anyone that would correspond with your Peggy McKeand in my line. There are also other McKeand branches (in Wigtownshire) that have no presently known connection with my family, and I'm sure that I don't have a complete picture of the siblings, certainly not before about 1800. My best estimate is that there were about 150 - 200 McKeands in Wigtownshire in the late 1700s. But other than these general thoughts on the family, I can't tell you too much! If you take a look at the web site spatial-literacy.org and enter "McKeand" you'll see where they were by 1881 (and in 1998 too). Galloway, and more particularly Wigtownshire, is clearly their home turf. I've also taken a look to see if Richard Ball's Elizabeth McKeand might appear in my tree, but although our family was strong in the Sorbie area in the mid to later 1800s, I don't see her in there either. Regards, Crawford MacKeand.