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.