Reeves DNA Project Updates - 3q 2018

At the end of September the project had 299 members, up from 293 at the end of June.

In July we welcomed three new members to the project, one of whom has since resigned from the project leaving "CK" and Taylor (for Darren). Two new members joined us in August; Jerry and Roy. September also saw three new members join the DNA Project; Frank's wife, Robby and Dan. You are all welcome. If you've yet to join The Reeves Project (TRP) where we document our research into the various R*v*(s) families, we'd encourage you to do so and share information about your ancestors with all our community members.

At the very end of the previous quarter, the result for Craig was added to the ungrouped pool as reported in the 2q 2018 Reeves DNA Project Update. After exchanging a few e-mails, Beverly was able to determine a connection between three results in the ungrouped pool and they were moved to create to our newest group, DNA Group 20.

During the quarter we've seen two new Y-DNA results as well as multiple upgrades results. However, one of those two new Y-DNA results belonged to the member who joined and left within this past quarter, leaving just one new result to report here for a member who joined us in the previous quarter.

    Kit N51874 for JR         added to DNA Group 10

We've also seen three new sets of mtDNA results and four Family Finder (at-DNA) results added for project members.

Reeves DNA Project - T&Cs

Gene by Gene, the company behind Family Tree DNA (FtDNA) continue to finesse their approach to privacy. By mid October 2018, all of their (volunteer) Group Project Administrators (GPA) have to accept (yet another) revision to their GPA Terms and Policies. One significant change we've spotted is in their approach to “pseudonymization”.

As I commented last quarter, privacy by design and default is (IMHO) to be welcomed. None of us want our credit card details, home address and other personal information splattered across the web by any organisation we have dealings with, whether that interaction is online or in more traditional forms. But as family history researchers, we also need to think very hard about why we spend our hard earned money on a genealogical DNA test (or why we accept the gift of such a test paid for by somebody else's hard earned money). The results of my test and your test IN ISOLATION have no useful purpose and little meaning. It is only when we share and combine those results and put them alongside traditional, records based research that they gain usefulness and hopefully give us insights.

In the past Barry sought from you details of your line of decent and with your consent they were posted to a web page over on Rootsweb. (As previously advised, those pages are no longer maintained and have only just come back online after the protracted outage experienced by the Rootsweb servers.) More recently, we've slowly been been transferring the lines of descent previously posted on Rootsweb into The Reeves Project (TRP). TRP does not include identifying information about any individual born within the past 100 years, unless we know for certain they are deceased. (However, if you wish to add personally identifying information about yourself, you may, but we don't encourage or require that.) We will continue to use the information which has been in the public domain via Rootsweb. If for some reason you've had a change of heart, please contact us to discuss removing your line of descent from The Reeves Project (TRP).

Since many of the admin's at the Reeves DNA Project at FtDNA are also admin's here at The Reeves Project (TRP) , we're going to have to look very carefully again at what information we can freely publish as new Y DNA results come in without breaching the latest GPA Terms and Policies over at FtDNA. One way round this issue will be for us to approach you individually and request explicit permission for TRP to publish your information. We'll keep you posted on our thinking and our plans.