I have a lot going on behind the scenes this month that I hope will be more obvious in November. To advance the World War I registration search a little I went ahead and posted the results for surnames starting with "Y" and "Z." There were no "X" surnames.

This doesn't look like much, but my main work was on the letter "W" and these are still being worked to prepare them for the web site. Finishing up the "W" group will also finish up this project, and I am looking forward to some new challenges in other research areas. So far we found 154 "W" surname cards and have only 121 left to research. Then it will be on to converting the files and posting them.

That said, there is one discovery that has been a surprise to me in the research. Although I do not have a final count yet, it is obvious from the draft cards that the dominant occupation listed by the registrants was that of farmer. For some reason I thought our migration from an agrarian society to an industrial society was further along by World War I. My best guess is that more than 75% of the registrants listed their occupation as that of farmer.
Our thanks to Lanelle Romines for pointing us back to the Georgia Archives web site. The State has made a significant improvement in both content and presentation in recent years and the site offers some interesting new information with regard to Death Certificates, Confederate Pension Applications, and many other documents. We encourage you to take a look at the site if you have not done so recently.

DNA research continues to be a good source of conversation among the researchers I have swapped note with in September and October.

This month I posted the remainder of the information concerning our mtDNA which completes the picture for anyone wanting to compare their analysis to ours. This additional posting shows the remaining differences between our mtDNA sequence and the full sequence and provides a base for future analysis.

As a reminder from last month, please encourage anyone in your family who is a serious researcher to locate a male member of their family to test. This is invaluable information and once the last male descendant in any line is gone, the ability to do DNA analysis over that line is gone.

If there is another topic floating around these days of interest to many of us it is the current release of the Family Tree Maker software for 2008. Data is data and the way it is stored logically changes over time.

However, this current version is creating a lot of conversation and not many accolades. Data may be data, but retrieving the data in a useful manner is critical for many who have very large files. We would not be able to generate about half of the reports on our web site if I were to convert to this new version, so logically I will have to wait for reporting improvements.

Ancestry.com is accepting suggestions and criticism to evaluate the 2008 version and if you have items you feel are significant by all means please give them the benefit of your suggestions.