I was determined this month that I was going to finally get to the end of the World War I Draft Registration work, and I finally posted the last card to the web site on November 5.

This little project proved to be anything but little and at the end of the day there were 1,402 cards found. If you have a male relative who was living during the time of the war registration you might just find a new fact or two in this area.

The final information concerning the cards is posted on the World War I page. You will see that there is a little to be learned here about occupations as well as other facts.

Now that the World War I records are done, I have turned my attention to the layout and presentation of data for each family. Being a Whitehead, I thought I should logically start there.

So a new format for organizing the information for each family is starting to take shape and you can see it on the Whitehead Family page. I have not finished the layout, but I am getting close.

As a part of this work I am going through and organizing the pictures that were associated with the Whitehead and Wise families on the old web site. My initial thoughts about how to reformat the pictures has almost worked, but some pictures just do not lend themselves to standardization. So I am following the original format I spelled out with practical modifications that fit the situation.

I mentioned to several of you that I found a family history in the Internet for the family of William Tazewell Whitehead. This family group migrated from western Georgia to Texas in the late 1800s, and the book makes for interesting reading.

The book was published back in 1976 by Bess Whitehead Scott and is not copyrighted. So i have added this book to our site for any of you to read who might be related to this branch fo the Whitehead family. I included the book in a new section for books.

The style of the books has it fall somewhere between a real historical book and a series of family stories or an oral history. But since the work was published as a book I decided to classify it as such. There are lots of interesting stories in the book, and it makes for an interesting read if you have any interest in this family.

The book is stored in three sections and the first two are quite large. So if you decide to read them then be patient on the download.

Only a genealogist could find death certificates an exciting topic, but they are proving to be another good source of data. The Georgia Archives has made a number of death certificates available between 1914 and 1927. We searched these files for known family members and found just over 360 certificates.

We are about half way through scrubbing them for the web site and should have them available during December. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the death certificates are date discrepancies and causes of death.

We are finding a large number of death date discrepancies with our records, which probably means that the deceased's tombstone is inaccurate. I find this to be especially interesting since you would think this one fact could be transcribed correctly.

I always hate to retrace my footsteps and do anything twice, but what i thought would be an improvement to the cemetery records is not working. The lack of a search function over the tombstone pictures is a real issue.

The way I organized the files presupposes that you know where a person is buried before you search for them. For large cemeteries the loading of the information is just too slow. The software I used to create the cemetery pages is also inefficient and actually creates three files for each tombstone.

All of that said, the only solution is to change the method of presentation to solve these problems. I have not counted, but I believe we have records on about two hundred cemeteries and about 3,000 tombstones. This will be a side project where I slowly tackle the problem in gaps with the other research.

The format I will use can be seen on the page for the Elmwood Cemetery in Greenwood County, South Caroilina. This cemetery is prominent in Kathy's family and our latest addition to the cemetery group.

We hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving and that you had a safe holiday with family and friends.