Doyle, I've found over the years a few points of light in the "black hole" period of March 1864 to June 1865, which show that enlistments and conscription continued, often with ever younger and older men. Maj. Bird's 1st Battalion Trans-Mississippi Cavalry, which I'm currently working on, is a case in point. Their muster-in roll is dated June 30, 1864. This battalion, also known as "Bird's Battalion of Arkansas and Louisiana Mounted Cadets", consisted of five companies of VERY young couriers -- aged 12 to 17, with a handful of older officers and NCO's. The boys were from southern Arkansas, northern Louisiana, and northeast Texas. There's no evidence that they ever served in combat; instead, they rode the courier lines in and out of Trans-Mississippi Department headquarters at Shreveport. The Arkansas company, Capt. Benjamin Turner's Company E, manned (or "boyed") the courier lines from Shreveport to Washington and Camden. It's interesting that Captain Turner reported the age of most of his boys as 17; however, in cross-checking the names against the 1860 census for Calhoun, Columbia, Lafayette, Ouachita and Union counties, I found that most of them were actually younger than that, in the range of 12 to 15 years old. The other companies rode the courier lines from Shreveport to Monroe, Alexandria, Marshall and Houston.

In addition to the occasional muster roll or pay roll from the black hole period, there are the hundreds of postwar pension applications which claim service during that time, not to mention postwar written narratives and family oral traditions. So it's safe to say that men didn't quit joining up after March 1864, it's just a lot harder to find the documentation.

You're right that the Gerdes site is getting more and more out of date. I've toyed with the idea of starting up a new website, but that would involve a major investment of time and energy. Currently, I'm using the Arkansas discussion board to post updates until I can figure something else out. The advantage in using this discussion board for updates is that I'm a beneficiary too. Just yesterday a gentleman posted some information regarding a Virginia pension application from a veteran of the 18th Arkansas Infantry. I've been adding helpful little tid-bits like that to my database for years, and over time it really enhances the information I have on each soldier. Unfortunately, those 85,000 names include a lot of "mystery men" whose identity cannot be positively determined -- a whole bunch of J. Smith's, for example.

To add to my fun (or misery) I am also working on a similar database for Louisiana soldiers. It's not nearly so far along as the Arkansas database, though. I had always planned to set up one for Missouri soldiers, but I'm probably too old to even think about that now. We'll see.