Happy Eleventh Birthday to TRP
by BeverlyEleven years ago, oddly on April Fool’s Day, I mused to the readers on the Rootsweb Reeves mailing list that what we needed was a way to share all of our Reeves’ documented data and interface those families with geography showing their migrations. There was so much misinformation circulating on the internet that I proposed the need for a Reeves’ community sharing the documented facts for our families.
Thankfully Barry Reeves was reading the posts that day, liked the idea and offered to investigate software to create such a database which could be placed on his servers. About a dozen other volunteers also liked the idea and came forward to begin the site that is now The Reeves Project.
Many years later with thousands of pages of profiles of Reeves’ individuals connected to their family members, locations and Y-DNA when available, plus transcriptions of wills, deeds, court records and countless other historical documents, we have made major inroads toward our initial goal. But as much as we’ve progressed, we could still benefit from the active participation of more of our members, so think about sharing more of your family’s information if you haven’t already.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this undertaking and especially to Barry who is still our benefactor and provides the servers to make it all possible.
Wiki Stats - End March 2021
The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 April 2021) now stands at 10841 (previously 10759, 10703, 10670) an increase of 82 pages during the month. Of the total, 2102 pages (was 2063, 2043, 2040) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 4620 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 4113 begin with the letter "R".Community members should log in to see more.
The chart below shows our growth over the past eleven years. In the twelve months since TRP's last birthday, we've collectively added 1048 pages of information relating to our R*v*(s) ancestors and their families.
The Reeves Project has also welcomed 48 new members over the same period of time, but sadly only a very few of you have become active contributors. If each of you, our 400+ users, contributed just one new page a month, which isn't such a huge request, TRP would be growing at around 5000 pages per year. In turn I'm sure that would attract more cousins to come forward and help grow our collective knowledge and break down some of those brick walls we all have in a R*v*(s) family trees.
TRP Users
We ended March 2021 with 469 user accounts registered in TRP, an increase of two over the previous month. We had three users successfully activated their account during the past month. We welcome to our community Floyd, Tracy and Blake.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 it helps, think of it as a name label badge; so your first name plus surname (or at least surname initial) would generally be a good choice. You'll find links to the remainder of the our six part First Steps as part of the FAQ - First Steps.
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.
Another Milestone
On 28 March TRP served up it's 15 millionth page view, we reached 14M back on 8 December 2020. Our home page appeared in somebody's browser over 900 times each day in the past month and over 5000 other pages are seen daily, so the information we all contribute here does get noticed.Reeves DNA Project Update
As mentioned previously we were excited to see a new match to the members of the recently formed DNA Group 21. Beverly reached out to Stewart and he joined our project very early in January and his results were duly added to DNA Group 21. In February we welcomed David. March has been a little busier, with five new kits registered. We welcome Larry, Amy, Christopher, Michelle and Beverly R.During the past quarter we've received the results for three new Y-DNA Donor members
Kit 906240 for DC presently ungrouped
Kit 943060 for LH presently ungrouped
Kit IN91351 for SR added to DNA Group 21We would encourage all new Y-DNA donors or their representatives to make contact and allow us to identify them within TRP.The Y-DNA test results for two of our three new Y_DNA members are currently sitting in the Project’s ungrouped pool and we strongly suspect they are both members of our DNA Group XX. Whilst we will automatically move Y-DNA matched results to the appropriate Project Group, we do not move unmatched results to DNA Group XX with out explicit confirmation to TRP from the donor or their proxy. Please take a minute to read DNA Group XX's home page within TRP for information on how to provide consent. All it takes is a simple proforma e-mail as described on the Home page....
During the past quarter we've seen no notifications for new Family Finder results (from a new at-DNA Donor) and one notification of the results from a new mt-DNA donor.
Activity Feed Accessibility
Last quarter we reported that the FtDNA Activity feed had suddenly stopped being visible to the world at large and could now only be read by project members when logged in. We feel this is a retrograde step since a casual reader may have been inspired to join us. We have approached FtDNA and are none the wiser as to why this change was made by them nor whether it will be reversed.If you missed last quarter's summary the DNA Project Update for 4q2020 is available here.