Our research of World War I Draft Registration cards is now up through the letter "S" and so far we have located 1,085 cards. This project is starting to feel like a never ending journey, but sooner or later we will get to the end. I keep telling myself to just do twenty each day and you will get to the end.

We will continue to work on these during the month of August and plan to finish up as soon as possible. We have a disproportionate number of family members remaining in the "W" group, as we mentioned last month.

This continues to be a good source of information for complete names, and we are finding a surprising number of birth date and place corrections. we would encourage you to look through the cards for your relatives to see what we found.

We made a trip to the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Clarke County, Georgia to finish up our tombstone search for known relatives. We have a few pictures to post from that visit, but they will have to wait for now.

Several of you were kind enough to send along cemetery pictures this month, and hopefully we have them all posted to the site.

One of the best things that happened this month was a running conversation among several of our researchers about the value of DNA testing and how much is enough.

The "how much is enough" opinion varies and I am not sure we reached any agreement. However, with a little luck we will have our DNA section of the web site up in the next month and this should create more debate, and hopefully some helpful thoughts for everyone.

When we think about the hobby of Genealogical Research it really is all about connections and trying to prove or disprove them. DNA offers a great deal of help with the accuracy of our research and I have little doubt that in our lifetimes this will be the key method of validating information found from other sources.

What we need is more people participating. My suggestion is do as much as you can reasonably afford. There seems to be some debate about the necessity of testing beyond 37 markers for now, but we learn more each day.

Last month we noted an opportunity for each of us to talk to our oldest relatives to see what they remember about their grandparents. We now have the Oral History section of the web site up and running when you have time to look.

We want to offer two examples of family writings that we feel illustrate the value of such an effort. First is an interview that I did with Frances Elizabeth Comer in 1989 just before her death. In this interview I asked her about many random events in her life and in the lives of many of her close relatives.

A second document is more autobiographical in nature and was created by a relative that I have to describe as colorful. Wiley Chandler Howard was a confederate officer and served in Cobb Legion of Calvary. He wrote a rambling narrative of his time in the Civil War and it is an invaluable record of just what the war was like for those who served. What is unique about our copy is that we had the opportunity to transcribe from his personal notes and we have all the corrections and additions made by his daughters. This speech is housed in many libraries around the country, but we have the original.