After fruitless googling and *not* watching the ExMo Conf. video all the way through, I can't find satisfaction. Is it possible that JS, Sr. would have used this this very book when he taught, influencing JS, Jr. to steal the idea for the BoM?

He stole everything else....

He didn't need to. Oliver Cowdrey and his dad would have taught it.

They were both schoolteachers.

Does it really matter? It's unquestionable from the textual parallels that The Late War influenced the BoM.

is there any update on the late war correlation? it seems to have gone quiet lately.

I saw on the website about it that there was more info coming but nothing has been updated in a long time.

As a matter of fact, on another board, an updated blog posting was advertised from one of the researchers (Duane):

http://blog.wordtree.org/2015/01/28/presentation-the-late-war-the-book-of-mormon/

The posting seems like a rehash of what was said originally. Duane did say this on the other board though:

"Chris (my brother and co-researcher) has reduced his level of confidence in the significance of our original study, because one of its weaknesses is it does not take in to account 4-grams that appear rare due to variation in subsequences of more common words. In other words, it's possible to come up with a rare 4-gram using common words (e.g. "their cries and their") but even though this phrase is unusual it's quite conceivable that another author could randomly come up with this phrase independently. I agree with him, and so we're working on a way of taking this in to account. The reason I'm still confident The Late War is related by more than chance is the high frequency of phrases that also turned out to have thematic and plot parallels. More study is needed, though."

thank you for that info :)