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The Kid, as he is commonly known, left very little record of his life. The Kid's childhood friends in Silver City, New Mexico claimed he was about 12 in 1873. This indicates that the Kid may have been born in 1860 or 1861. 1859 has also been used as his birth date. The reason for this is so that later in the Billy the Kid legend when Garrett supposedly kills Billy, he would have been twenty one. His real name also remains a mystery. He is most famously knwon as William H. Bonney. As a child, people knew him as Henry McCarty. From the tim he was born until about 1870, the Kid left no traces of his life. Catherine McCarty, Billy's mother, and her two sons arrived in Kansas in 1870 accompanied by her husband, William Antrim. In 1873, they then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1874, Billy's mother died of tuberculosis. Mr. Antrim moved himself along with his step-sons to live with some friends of his. Nilly and his brother continued going to school while their stepdad would come and go. The two brothers wound up getting separated and bounced from one foster home to the next. Bill Antrim relieved himself of all parental rights and left them to fend for themselves while he moved to