Reeves Mailing List - Moving Home

It's just under a year since we celebrated the fact that RootsWeb had finally allowed Beverly to adopt the Reeves list.

In early January 2020 Ancestry announced that all RootsWeb mailing lists are to be discontinued. As of today (18 Feb2020) that announcement reads as follows

Beginning March 2nd, 2020 the Mailing Lists functionality on RootsWeb will be discontinued. Users will no longer be able to send outgoing emails or accept incoming emails. Additionally, administration tools will no longer be available to list administrators and mailing lists will be put into an archival state. Administrators may save the emails in their list prior to March 2nd. After that, mailing list archives will remain available and searchable on RootsWeb.

Whilst the loss of the mailing list functionality is regrettable, it is good to see they are intending to retain the mailing list archives.

We've been scratching our heads over what to do. One view was that mailing lists were now somewhat old hat and we have enough other channels to share Reeves Genealogy research, including here at The Reeves Project (TRP), the Reeves DNA Project at Family Tree DNA (FtDNA) , the Reeves Facebook page and Beverly's blog Reeves, Reaves, and More Rives. The contrarian view was that mailing lists have a unique advantage that they "push" their new content to all their members (subject to their personal subscription choices) and you don't have to remember to go and check each place for new content.

We spent a bit of time looking at alternative and similar platforms and we're pleased to announce we've created a new Reeves-L mailing list at Groups.io. Groups.io has some additional capabilities, (some free and some only available with a subscription) which we'll consider using at a later date.

Beverly has gone ahead and added ALL members of the existing Reeves list at RootsWeb to the new Groups.io platform and you should have already received an e-mail inviting you to join us there. If your spam filter block that message or you weren't previously a Reeves list member you can join us at Groups.io by visiting https://groups.io/g/Reeves-L and clicking on the blue "+ Join This Group" button.

PS An Apology to existing Reeves List Members at Rootsweb. It would seem that the RootsWeb mailing list was having a hissing fit yesterday (17Feb). Beverly attempted to send an e-mail to the list and it failed to get delivered or to get added to the archives. In case it was picking on Beverly, I tried to send essentially the same message on her behalf - that also appeared to fail. This morning Beverly posted a message directly via the web interface and that initially appeared not to get posted. And then, a little later, all three messages made it through; we guess Ancestry/RootsWeb fixed the glitch. Our apologies for spamming the list's members, but we hope you agree it was an important message.

Wiki Stats - End January 2020

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 February 2020) now stands at 9620 (previously 9550, 9457, 9405) an increase of 70 pages during the month. Of the total, 1801 pages (was 1795, 1794, 1781) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning.     We currently have 4116 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 3661 begin with the letter "R".

Community members should log in to see more.

TRP Users

We ended January 2020 with 409 user accounts registered in TRP, an increase of five. We had four users successfully activated their accounts during the past month. We welcome to our community Joe R, Barbara R, Micheal K and Mark R. Its great to see Joe has already created an AboutMe page for himself, as described in First Steps - Part 2.

Whether you joined TRP recently or a while ago, 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 by sending an email to 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.