Wiki Stats - End September 2018

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 October 2018) was 8118 (previously 7982, 7845, 7617) an increase of 136 pages during the month. Of the total, 1613 pages (was 1590, 1566, 1542) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 3547 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 3098 begin with the letter "R".
Community members should log in to see more.

This is the fifth successive month where more than 100 new pages have been added to TRP and as previously noted, we passed the 8000 page mark late on 1^st September.

TRP Users

We ended September 2018 with 348 user accounts registered in TRP, an decrease of nine over the previous month. During the month we done some long over due housekeeping and removed 12 user accounts which had been requested but then never activated by the requester.
During September, we received requests for four new users accounts and three have been successfully activated during the month. We welcome new community members Connie, Dan and Jeffery and look forward to reading their contributions to TRP

If you have yet to do so, please set a meaningful name for yourself as described in First Steps - Part 1. It isn't difficult and only takes a couple of minutes to do.

If you have already started the enrolment process and are having issues, please do let us know. Please contact New User Admin via TRP123 (at) TheReevesProject (dot) org if you're stuck and need help. If you are not yet a member and would like to contribute to our community, please complete our Join Us form to start the membership enrolment process.

Software Upgrade - Advanced Notice

The admins here at TRP are just starting work on the next upgrade of the software underpinning our wiki. We don't have a firm time-line in mind at the moment, but we'll let you know via this Latest News page when we do.

For our testing we use a copy of the live wiki to make sure that, as far as we are able, everything works as we expect. That copy includes all of the "watches" individual users may have set on specific wiki pages. So if our testing changes the cloned copy of one of the pages you've set a watch on, you will get an e-mail telling you the page has been changed. On the live system those watch notifications come from e-mail address "notifier". If you get a watch notification from e-mail address "T.Notifier", please disregard it, that will be us testing.

Whilst we are testing, there should not be any impact of the live copy of TRP that everybody uses. And I'm sure everybody will be relieved to hear that we're not expecting an outage like the one we suffered at the start of this year, when we do come to make the upgrade.

Reeves DNA Project Update

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.

The DNA Project Update for 2q2018 is available here