Boyd's Islands suggests a family connection, a moment when land and water were parcelled out and labelled according to whoever held or worked them, though the precise story behind the name remains difficult to pin down.

The townland name Knockacroghery derives from the Irish, broadly meaning the hill of the hangman or the hill of the execution, a placename type found in scattered locations across Ireland and generally indicating a site associated with judicial execution in the Gaelic or early colonial period. Whether Boyd's Islands have any connection to that local history, or simply took the name of a later landholding family, is the kind of question that sits unanswered in the landscape itself.

Beyond that, the documentary record for these islands is presently thin, and what survives awaits fuller examination. The islands remain a named feature on the Mayo landscape, the kind of small, marginal place that accumulated significance once, however quietly, and has been carrying the trace of it ever since.