Dear all, This has been a wonderful Christmas for our project, as the members of this list have showered us with donations! We've made great progress, and are now more than three quarters of the way to our goal. We have $5,743 as of tonight, with only $1,912 to go, to reach our goal of $7,655. Maybe we can even surpass that goal, as we did in our campaigns two years ago. That would be great, as we had to trim back our original goal. If it turns out there is enough support, we can start preparing to test the next batch of samples that Matthew and Thomas will collect in January, which will probably cost close to $2800, depending on how many there are. I'm sorry to hear that a few people have been having trouble using the Experiment.com website. A few tips: * Once you've clicked on "Back This Project," you don't have to use the option of Facebook, or any other social media, to log in or create an account. All you need to do is click on the "Register" button on the upper right, if you have never used the Experiment site before. * On the screen the Register button takes you to, you again have the choice of either using Facebook, OR using your email, to register and create an account. Once you have your account, you're good to go. * If you already have an account, simply use your email address and your password to log in. Ignore the Facebook option, if you don't care to use it. I'm sorry that my boldface URLs acquired asterisks in the Rootsweb version of the email. Here is the simple link which hopefully, should go directly to the site: http://experiment.com/A00west It's very heartening to see how much support we have among the members of this list. It makes sense, since this is where genetic genealogy started, and the old-timers know me better than some of the recent crowd on Facebook. We still have a ways to go with this project, but there are many good signs, like Thomas' trip to Cameroon, and Dr. Melissa Wilson Sayres offering to help with the analysis of our data. Together, we can make it a great success! Bonnie : -- *Farther Back We All Connect*

Dear all, We received an outstanding flood of generosity for several days after my initial posting about our project. I'm so grateful to this community! Our total is now at $6300. However, the job is not yet done. While you're busy making your last-minute charitable donations, please take a minute to help us reach our goal by January 6th. The end is in sight! We're still $1355 short -- not bad, but it means we need a number of people to pitch in. http://Experiment.com/A00west I think there must be a few of you who are waiting to the last minute, to see how much we'll need to put us over the top. There's no need to wait, as you can easily increase your donation on Jan. 5th if you see that we need it. Plans are going forward for Thomas' trip to Cameroon in late January. In addition to helping with sampling and returning results to donors, he's going to be sending back a lot of pictures and geospatial data, maybe even live video! Please help us get ready, and not run out of the support needed to send Matthew out to collect the samples, and for YSEQ to test them. I've been looking at the most unusual haplotypes, other than the 35+ A00, from those tested so far. It looks like at least two of them might be Cameroonian R1b! Whit's predictor doesn't include a lot of the relevant African haplogroups, but it classifies another one as Q. In Africa? Maybe an extreme outlying R1b? These obviously will need to have SNPs tested if we ever want to find out what they are! I've just come to the conclusion that another belongs to the rare B1 clade, and it wasn't hard to see that another is A0a1a. Another one could possibly be B2b, but it has no near matches, it's still a mystery. At least one is E1a, three of them look like E2, and three others, I'm sure are B2a1. None of these non-A samples will be tested with your current donations to the project, which are for the purpose of learning more about A00. We need to focus, first and foremost, on meeting the goal of our campaign at Experiment.com, because remember, without the A00 project going forward, we won't be able to continue collecting and discovering such rare kinds of Y-DNA. If you have already donated to the project and would like to send us something to help identify the mystery samples, you may send a donation to the PayPal account and designate it for that purpose. Thanks! Bonnie http://experiment.com/A00west