Volume 8 and Indices Status

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William Boyer

William Boyer

President, Association of American Boyers, Inc.

Part of the Association's mission is to expand and share the knowledge of our genealogies. The publication of volume 8 and the indices are part of this continuing effort.

It has been over 15 years since the publication of volume 7 of the 7th edition of American Boyers and many of you have probably wondered if the edition would ever be completed. The short answer is YES. What follows is an update on our historian Donald’s efforts to complete volume 8. Then there is some information on the work needed for the index and associated appendix material to be completed, with links to other places on the website where volunteers can assist. Lastly is a rough timeline for completion with the inclusion of getting the information ready for publication, which will be on-demand printing this time around. So please continue to read and let us know if you can help or have any questions.

Historian's Update on Volume 8

Donald has begun going through the material that has been gathered and written for volume 8 over the past twenty plus years. There are currently approximately 180 chapters that have been created. In addition, there are a number of chapters containing unknown pieces of new or existing chapters. A maximum of 260 chapters will be created with a limitation based on the number of pages that can be published in a single volume. It is our hope that this will move with all due speed to completion in a reasonable time frame. With the Internet and better communications, we expect to work in parallel and format completed chapters while others are under development. This way time to publication can be reduced. Nevertheless it will still be a large undertaking (Not as big as the index) and could take another 18 to 24 months before publication. We will continue to post updates on the site as more concrete progress is made to completion.

Index and Appendix Project

It will be a herculean effort to build the index for all 8 volumes of the 7th edition. Luckily 87% of the material has already been published in the first 7 volumes and the work can begin on indexing those volumes in parallel to the completion of volume 8, thus leaving less to do once that book is complete. Also there are a number of appendix chapters that are in various states of readiness for publication. Some will benefit from the update to our website (past reunions) and take much less time to complete. This will not all be done quickly without volunteers to help. You can help by checking out our Get Involved page to see what you can do to get these volumes to publication.

Timeline to Completion

The work of gathering, formatting, and preparing for publication for both volume 8 and the index is expected to be time consuming. Volunteer help will assist us in speeding up the time to publication. It is expected that as sections are completed, final formatting for publication can occur. If this is done in parallel to work by volunteers we would envision the completion and publication of volume 8 within 12 to 18 months and the index within 18 to 24 months. Understand these are not hard deadlines and that the historian and the president (who does the editing and formatting) are not getting any younger and do have other responsibilities. With that said we will make a best effort to complete this major undertaking as soon as is feasible. Your help will get us to completion of a project that started over 50 years ago (right after the 6th edition was published).

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