Sometime in April 1951, my father's aunt, Alice McShane, visited my mother in  the Route Hospital in Ballymoney and asked her to include the name Boyd when  she and my father were choosing a name for their new baby.  If she explained why the name Boyd was so important to her, my mother did not remember many of the  details.  The baby was duly christened William John Boyd Gray and, for some  reason that has never been entirely clear, was always known as Boyd.  That baby  was me.  It has never been an easy name to live with; I always have to repeat  it and am frequently called William Boyd by people who should know better.

It was only with the advent of the internet and the increasing popularity of  genealogy, that I decided it was time to find out why I was called Boyd.  Much  to my surprise, when I searched for my name on the precursor of Google, I found  that the United States was littered with Boyds.  I had only ever met one before  here in Ulster.  As my research progressed, I was even more surprised to learn  that Alice McShane was actually called Mary Alice Boyd Gray on her birth  certificate; my aunt Moira was really called Mary Boyd Gray; and I even had a  first cousin once removed called John Boyd Galbraith in Beacon New York!  I  assumed that somewhere in my ancestry, a Miss Boyd had married a Mr. Gray, and  in keeping with what I had discovered was a fairly common Scotch-Irish  convention, they had decided to include her maiden name in one of their  children's names.  When I started, I had no idea it would take six years before  I found the origin of that name.  When I found it, after six years of  experience, I was totally amazed that I ever found it at all, such is the  difficulty of researching family history in Ulster.

In fact, it was not me who found it at all.  A fellow researcher was browsing  through an obscure microfilm of Old Age Pension census enquiries in her Family  History Centre in Texas.  She knew of my quest and was always alert to the  possibility of finding something useful for me.  In 1917, John Brewster  believed he was 70 and therefore qualified for the recently introduced Old Age  Pension.  But he needed to prove his age.  As was the practice in pre-Partition  Ireland, when no-one but the wealthy had birth certificates, he applied to the  authorites in Dublin to check the 1851 census to find his age.  He gave his  father's name and address as Robert Brewster of Dromore.  She knew this was my  great great grandfather.  There was also a space for his mother's name.   Unusually, he gave her maiden name.  There it was: Mary Boyd!  So, I had been  looking in the wrong place all the time.  It was a Brewster-Boyd, not a Gray- Boyd marriage.

Of course, delighted as I was to find the origin of my Boyd name, by this time  my interest in family history had become far more than a search for one name.   As any of you will know for whom this hobby has become a passion, family  history is much more than a search for names.  To understand it properly, you  need to research and understand the history of your own people.  But more than  that, it gives you an insight into the lives of those people, people who lived  only a few short decades ago.  People who lived and loved, sorrowed and  grieved, prospered and grew old and sometimes fought and died, people who  thought they were the centre of the universe but who are now long forgotten  perhaps as little as only two generations later.  It is a humbling thought.

If you are of my generation and related to me, you should find your name here.   You will also find a lot of your ancestors if we have them in common.  What you  will not find is a record of all the children and now even grandchildren of my  siblings and cousins.  That has never been my concept of family history.  I  will leave that to someone else.  This is a record of the lives of my Gray and  Gordon families: two very ordinary Ulster-Scots families of the Bann Valley in  the 19th and 20th centuries.  Let me know what you think by signing the guest  book.