This is a list for relatives of people named William Lee. More than 2500 people named William Lee have been identified as having descendants. Many of them are not related to each other, but some are. This has been a private email list for the last two years, but now we are seeking to give it a permanent home.

I have two ancestors named William Lee. The first apparently died on April 16, 1746 in the battle fought at Culloden Muir (Moor), near Inverness, Scotland. The second was born near Inverness, Scotland on August 11, 1776 and died on September 10, 1849 in Philadelphia.

I attempted to form this as a rootsweb.com group. However, Rootsweb would not allow this. They said that I would have to post this as a topic under the Lee Surname Group.

However, that will not work. There are too many people named William Lee to just be a subgroup of a much larger LEE group. Almost every Lee Family has a William in it.

Rootsweb wrote back the following answer to my request to start a William Lee email group:

"WE have received your request to create a surname based mailing list at RootsWeb. Please note that we do not create mailing lists for individuals or even a group of individuals like you describe. You can use the existing LEE surname list to start threads of conversations on the topic you describe.

"We will not create this kind of a mailing list.

"Best regards,

"Gerhard
"Acting List Master"