Wiki Stats - End March 2012

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 April 2012) now stands at 4105 (previously 3947, 3829, 3724), an increase of 158 pages during the past month. Of these 745 pages (was 702, 669, 591) begin with number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 1306 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 990 begin with the letter "R".

As previously noted, the 4000th active wiki page was added during March and its pleasing to see the total number of active wiki pages in TRP has already topped 4100.

TRP Users

We currently have 72 user accounts on TRP, including 5 new members who successfully activated their accounts in March. We welcome Kay, Karen, Joan, Ralene & Leslie and look forward to their contributions to TRP.

Two Years On

                  by Beverly Watson

Hard to believe that it's already been two years, but as Martin recently reminded me, it was on April 1, 2010 (April Fool's Day) that I wrote a post to the Reeves mailing list at Rootsweb which was the catalyst for this project. I just threw out a suggestion that there must be some way to collaborate and record all our families geographically which would eventually help to identify a particular Reeves' family in a specific county in each state.

There was quite a bit of interest from the readers of the list and Barry Reeves, creator of the Reeves Registry, offered to investigate software options and host the program to be used on his servers. Barry researched possible choices and decided that Tiki Wiki software could be used to create our database.

After a month or two of experimentation and learning about Tiki Wiki software, we began to enter Reeves' families and historical data. There have been countless discussions on such subjects as the overall look of the wiki, what links should be included in the Home Page and various other topics where everyone had a different opinion, but we put each matter to a vote and forged on with the project.

As you can see by accessing a US state from the Wiki Home Page, the southern states along the eastern seaboard have the most data, especially North Carolina. Then those states along migratory paths westward have varying degrees of data with Tennessee, Georgia and Kentucky having the most at present. In states such as Ohio, Texas and Mississippi we've barely begun. Martin, our only contributor in the UK, is single handedly making great strides adding data for Great Britian and we are planning to submit a post to the UK Reeves mailing list in the near future in hope of attracting more contributors there.

The Reeves DNA Project has also been included in the wiki database and individuals whose descendants have participated in that project are linked to their DNA Group adding scientific documentation of those lineages and family connections. My own family line is represented in DNA Group 6 and after Martin's request some time ago, I am working toward entering the complete family lineage for my family in that DNA structure . Thanks to the inclusion of the DNA project results, we have recently found that Reeves of DNA Group 10 from northern Virginia who migrated to Kentucky and Ohio were of the same family as Reeves who settled in South Carolina, Georgia and eventually migrated into Tennessee. Using the DNA project results in this way opens up exciting possibilties for discovering family origins.

The collaborative aspects of this project have proved a great benefit. On many occasions, by combining our knowledge of various Reeves' families in a particular area, Carolyn and I have been able to identify two or three completely different Reeves' families in one county rather than assume they are all one family simply due to proximity. And searching the probate records of a county for all of the Reeves' documents goes much faster when several researchers are involved. When FamilySearch.org put all the probate records of York County, South Carolina online, Richard and I spent several months searching those records, adding the data to the wiki and documenting family connections as they had never been in the past. In other instances, we have new members who aren't currently ready to learn the wiki software yet want to share their family research so they have forwarded it to us for inclusion.

When Martin asked for my comments on The Reeves Project - two years later, my intention was to make it the "Readers Digest version" but there was just a lot to say about this project. If we have been able to achieve this much in only two years, in time maybe we can have all the Reeves in the United States and Great Britain included and hopefully find those transatlantic migrations linking to both. Then we can move on to the rest of the known world.