Doyle Williams was born in Southern Oklahoma to Carrie and Larkin Eugene Williams in 1943. He was their ninth child. At the age of 4 his parents moved the family to the nearby town of Ardmore, where Doyle grew up before going off to college at the University of Oklahoma. There he earned a degree in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and then went to work as structural test engineer for General Dynamics' Fort Worth Division. While he worked he continued his education, earning a Masters of Mechanical Engineering from Southern Methodist University, at Dallas. He also began interviewing his elderly aunts and uncles and collecting their oral histories. After a career of almost forty years in aerospace, he retired and began to write a history of his family, first writing My Father's Branch: The Lineage, Lore & Life of Larkin Eugene Williams, and then writing his latest book, My Mother's Branch: The Lineage and Life Carrie Viola Reeves and Her Family.