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TRP News - 01 April 2020

April 2020 - Ten Years On

Happy Tenth Birthday to TRP

                  by Beverly

April 1st of 2020 will mark the tenth anniversary of The Reeves Project. Over these ten years, thanks to dedicated researchers and countless descendants who have been willing to participate in DNA testing, we now have much more reliable information for these families of Reeves, Reaves, Rives, Reavis and other variations of the surname. As a result, together we’ve created an amazing database of individuals and their lineages.

As most of you know, the concept for the project began on the postings to the Reeves List at Rootsweb and, sadly, this year we have seen the end of that mailing list. Ancestry who now owns Rootsweb has discontinued the mailing list service although they have retained archives of the messages and Reeves’ information we’ve exchanged throughout the years. Since we all felt that the mailing list had been important to our research and ability to contact each other, in February we found a site that we believe will fill that void with a replacement at Groups.io

Anticipating that The Reeves Project’s next anniversary will reveal that we have persevered through this worldwide pandemic to find our world healthy and hopeful. In the meantime, we have lots of time to research our Reeves’ families while we shelter in place at home for the foreseeable future.

Wiki Stats - End March 2020

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 April 2020) now stands at 9793 (previously 9711, 9620, 9550) an increase of 82 pages during the month. Of the total, 1839 pages (was 1827, 1801, 1795) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning.     We currently have 4195 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 3740 begin with the letter "R".

Community members should log in to see more.


TRP Users

We ended March 2020 with 421 user accounts registered in TRP, an increase of six. We had five users successfully activated their accounts during the past month. We welcome to our community Margaret P, Beverly H, Paul A, Rod and Kimberly.

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.

Reeves DNA Project Quarterly Update

In January we welcomed Sherri and Keith; sadly we also saw one member resign from the project.   In February we welcomed three new members; Teresia, Diana and Carolyn. Thus far in March we've seen one new members; welcome Paul..

During the past quarter we've received the results for just one new Y-DNA Donor member as follows
    Kit  768176 for PR          added to DNA Group 07   
We hope this individual or his representative will make contact and allow us to identify them within TRP.     Three existing Y-DNA Donors received upgraded results.     We've seen no new Family Finder results and two new mt-DNA results for Reeves DNA Project members during the past quarter.

What we don't know .. ..

It's relatively easy for us to talk about the exisiting Y-DNA results and the various DNA Groups we've identified plus the many results which are curently unmatched. You'll have noticed we do it fairly frequently! Its far more difficult for us to talk about the test results we don't have. But in mid February, over on the blog "Reeves, Reaves and More Rives" Beverly posted an article detailing some of the early US familes which, so far, aren't included within the scope of the Reeves Y-DNA Project. Please take a moment to read "Y-DNA Needed for These Reeves Familes". If you are male and have a continuous male line of descent from any one of these families, we'd love for you to consider taking a Y-DNA test and joining our Reeves DNA Project. We also need more Y-DNA donors from the British Isles to join our project.

Interesting Times

With many of us being encouraged/required to spend time at home, how about some reading (and viewing) material? I'm an avid reader of the blog written by Judy G Russell aka The Legal Genealogist and most Sundays she devotes her post to DNA topics. If you've not read any of her work, I've three recent posts to recommend.

On 16 February 2020 she posted an article which I think should be compulsory reading for anybody contemplating taking a Y-DNA test or intending to ask somebody else to be a Y-DNA Donor. Please take a few minutes to read and digest "What DNA can't tell us" at https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2020/02/16/what-dna-cant-tell-us/. Here at The Reeves DNA Project we've seen several individual whose surname is Reeves (or a variant) resign from our Project when they found their Y-DNA had an affinity with another surname. By all means go and join that other surname's project but we really wish they would also stay with us and for the benefit of future generations help document their Reeves story.

Then just a couple of weeks later on 01 March 2020 was a post "All the facts ..." at https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2020/03/01/all-the-facts/ Now again this will only take a few minutes of your time to read, but you really need to then set aside an hour to watch the presentation given by Blaine T. Bettinger at Roots Tech 2020 which it links to.

Her post "Before we buy that kit ... " from 08 December 2019 at https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2019/12/08/before-we-buy-that-kit/ touches on the issues of seeking informed consent, a topic which she returns to fairly regularly.

As serious Family Historians we are all aware that a genealogical DNA test isn't just a bit of fun, but other may be less astute. Debbie Kennett is a UK based genetic genealogist, speaker and author. She recently posted a thought provoking piece to the Hampshire England Genealogy mailing list at https://groups.io/g/Hampshire-England-genealogy/topic/71470700#178 in response to another member's message.

In these interesting time, please be careful and be caring.


If you missed last quarter's summary the DNA Project Update for 4q2019 is available here.




Contributors to this page: MartinB. and Beverly .
Page last modified on Wednesday 01 of April, 2020 04:13:56 CDT by MartinB..