I got a pop up telling me my village had reached the maximum capacity - at a population of 90. Is this right? In some of the advertised screen shots for this game I've seen villages with 700+ people. Am I missing a key activity or a puzzle to raise my population?

Yes, the population limit is 90 villagers. The screen shots that you saw were from a development version of the game that used those fields to display other information. The population was not actually that high.

oops ...it's my fault. I used special codes to generate more people to create the screenshots and then I didn't actually see that number....

will it ever be increase even to 100 would be great.

or If you can feed maybe lets see 1000 peeps?

but you will have to get food and build let say 10 huts

I managed to finish my first game with 13 villagers - ok, a few died, but I solved all the puzzles, and am feeling quite proud!

lol ive done al puzzels with 90

lol guys how good is VV

I suceeded with one game and got a max of 91. Don't know how. Was my first game. The others are only 90.

If you have twins when you have 89 babies, you get 91. Same with Triplets and 92. It may be possible with events to get a bit higher (i.e. you have 92 and get a crate of triplets).

It has been reported that peeps have had upto 94 or 96. Maybe during startup, to moms get twins. But I think 96 is the very max I've heard of.

I had 91 briefly, but then several of the elderly ones died and I had 85.

so if you have a max of 90 people and youre ready to birth the golden child what do you do? just wait for someone to die so you can make a new baby?

If you already have the max population you can only get the GC if one of your ladies is nursing a baby. If you have no nursing moms, you will have to wait until one of your old villagers passes away of old age or an island event that results in someone leaving(I can't say any more on that because it could be crossing the 'spoiler' boundary lol).

Is there anyway to "force" an island event???

As far as I know, the events are completely random. They just happen every once in a while. Some of them will offer a choice and some of them do not. There was a person who had all but one male villager die on them, and they had to wait for what seemed like forever to get an event that involved a 'bucket of babies' where a basket of 2 toddlers washed up onto the beach. A lot of us followed that story because most of us had not had all but 1 villager gone and knew that there was always a chance that it could happen to us someday too lol.
I would just keep maintaining your village until your population decreases naturally, hopefully it won't take too long.