Now is that time of year when we look back and reflect at what we have accomplished in the last 12 months. Here’s a little trip down memory lane as we remember a few highlights from 2012.

We started 2012 with an amazing experience at Rootstech 2012. We had a great audience for all of our sessions where we were able to enthusiastically share power of collaboration in genealogy. It was also exciting to see new and innovative technological advancements in the world of genealogy. We’re very grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of it!

This year we also made some major improvements to Geni’s Projects. With a new look and better ways to share project photos and documents, users were able to better utilize projects in their genealogical research. We first introduced projects as a way for users to work together on a group of related profiles. Since then, we’ve been amazed at the imaginative ways users have used projects to rally entire communities to work together on a common genealogical goal, whether it was to add the family trees of every passenger and crew member of the RMS Titanic or to organize country portals to help users in different countries all around the world.

2012 also brought about a new way to share your Geni experience with your friends and family. Social Sharing easily allows you to share your public Geni activities with your friends and family on Facebook. Now all your genealogy Facebook friends can check out the collaborative genealogical efforts being done on the World Family Tree.

This year also brought about smarter Tree Matches. We spent a lot of time improving our algorithm for fewer, more accurate matches to make finding new relatives and growing your tree faster. And once we add MyHeritage’s Smart Matching technology, you’ll see more matches than ever before.

That brings me to our most exciting news of the year – Geni is now a part of the MyHeritage family! Both websites will remain separate, with Geni focused on collaborative genealogy. In addition to this news, we announced these other great changes: no more tree limits, free relationship paths, free merging, free family tree downloads and no more ads! We’ve been overwhelmed by the warm response from the community. After just one week, we saw the number of profiles added increase by 24% and the number of profiles merged increase by 61%. And the World Family Tree hit 66 million profiles!

As we enter 2013, we are thrilled by the prospects of introducing even more exciting features to the site. In the coming months, we will be adding MyHeritage’s Record Matching technology to give our community the opportunity to access over 4 billion historical records!  We’ll continue to add more features to help you discover and connect with even more relatives and we can’t wait to share it with you!

Here’s to another exciting year in 2013!

Happy New Year!