As I researched my own Bynum line, working backwards from the Bynums in Titus County, Texas, I couldn’t find enough information in the public records to positively identify their ancestors. My Bynum ancestors tended to live in places whose public records had been largely destroyed.  They didn’t leave wills.  They couldn’t read or write. They moved frequently without leaving many traces behind, and they weren’t prominent enough to merit many appearances in published documents.   So I had to identify their families by deduction; eliminating as many other possibilities as possible and looking for even the slightest clues.   That lead me to gather a great deal of information about Bynums in general.   In the late 1970s, several other Bynum researchers urged me to publish what I had collected.

 The result was a book, Bynum and Baynham Families of America 1616-1850 (Gateway Press, 1983)   which organized all my research on early Bynums in an format which attempted to identify the descendants, through 1850, of all Bynum immigrants to America.   It was reasonably complete and generated some very kind comments, but was understandably weak in some areas where I simply hadn’t collected much data.   (This book is long since sold out.)

 The following pages are limited to my particular Bynum line.   I have omitted the general historical comments contained in the book, but added a few details on the individuals in my line that were not appropriate in the book.   More importantly, I have also noted the sources for most of the key facts, which were not specified in the book.