April Fool’s Day - 5 Years Later

                  by Beverly Watson

As Martin recently called to my attention, we are approaching the 5th anniversary of the post I submitted to the Reeves List at Rootsweb on April Fool’s Day 2010 which was the stimulus that set about the creation of The Reeves Project. Barry Reeves was immediately interested and volunteered to investigate software that could possibly be used to create the database as well as offering to provide space on his servers for the data. The idea was embraced from day one by numerous Reeves’ researchers like Martin Barker, Carolyn Gray Mahady, the late Richard Reeves and countless others who volunteered to participate in the project.

It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, yet a lot has happened in these five years and we’ve managed to compile an impressive database of Reeves’ information. Thanks to the Reeves’ DNA Project, we’ve also solved some mysteries and debunked some myths. However, we still have a long way to go with many more individuals and their families to identify and affiliate with the correct Reeves’ lineage.

Geographically, we’ve added a large percentage of the Reeves’ families in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama to the project as well as transcriptions of historical documents in those areas. We’ve only begun to add data for Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas and other states in the central portion of the US so we still have a long way to go, but there are some excellent researchers adding more individuals and source documents to the database all the time. Let’s hope the next five years are as productive as these first five.

Wiki Stats - End March 2015

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 April 2015) now stands at 6254 (previously 6185, 6158, 6144), an increase of 69 pages during the past month.   Of these 1273 pages (was 1273, 1270, 1270) begin with number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 2562 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 2146 begin with the letter "R".


Thanks to all our contributing members, the growth of information within TRP over the past five years has been remarkable.

TRP Users

We ended March 2015 with 209 user accounts registered with TRP, with four new members successfully activating their account during the month. We welcome Angela, Shirley, Katherine and James and look forward to their contributions to TRP.