Well just when you think things can not change, they often do. Our Y-DNA results have been in for months and we thought we had learned everything we could. But our testing company took it one step further and we did learn a few new things.

First our Haplogroup changed in this refinement from R1b1c7 to R1b1b2e. That is nothing more than a further refinement of the R1b1 group as new testing is available, but it is a little more information and in time will help with matching to others.

But how many matches did we get? Well at a 67 marker test the closest we come to an exact match is a genetic distance of 3. There are four individuals with this match, and a 98%+ chance that we are related. So we will be contacting all four to see if we can understand the match.

One thing that did not change in this refinement is the origin of our Whitehead family. At this level of refinement the most likely origin of the family is still Ireland, and for two reasons. First, we still match to the "Niall of the Nine Hostages" progenitor. Second, when we look at people with similar matches we come up with Ireland and Scotland as the most frequent matches. Everyone has not run the deepest test, so we have to look at exact matches at each testing level, but here is what it shows as the three most frequent country matches.

The more markers you test, the more difficult it is to get exact matches, but the consistency of the results no matter how deep we test is significant. Sandford Whitehead listed his family origin as English in the Federal Census, but it looks like our deep origin in Ireland is pretty definite. England could have been their port of departure, or the family could have migrated to England over the centuries and had no recollection of their Irish roots.

If you are not a descendent of Sandford Whitehead and have not had a male relative tested, please do so. There is no way to better understand your ancestry and to eliminate whole areas of false leads in your genealogical research.

Last month we published our first thoughts on the origins of Sandford Whitehead's family. This month we continue that discussion with a recap of the Whitehead families we were tracking and possible connections to ours.

This update includes a listing of the relevant families we track in the area as well as census data for the family as it matured in Clarke, Jackson, Oconee, and Oglethorpe Counties.

The file is starting to grow in size, so please be patient when you view it.

Our thanks to Jane Mullis, a descendant of Zachariah Taylor Whitehead, for locating pictures of Zachariah and his wife Mollie M. Dickens. He was the fifth of six sons born to Sandford and Elmina Whitehead.

I believe that these bear a striking resemblance to other family members and are an important addition to our collection of family photographs. She also located pictures of their tombstones at the Johnson United Methodist Church in Oconee County, Georgia.

This month we also refreshed the information in the "All Individuals" section of the web site, so this information is current as of July 10. We now have just over 42,400 people in the file thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people.