Geni Launches!

Are there any plans to add features like embedding your family tree into a personal website?

this looks excellent, however, i see no place to create an account. i’m using firefox 2 on a mac, just in case that helps.

Geni: Everyones Related

the brainchild of former PayPal executive David Sacks, Geni does for genealogy what Cogmap is doing for organizational hierarchies. the collaborative online-tool for building family-trees is Flash-based and persuades new users with a very low entry-bar…

I just got set up with an account and I really love what you’ve done with this site. The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. I look forward to seeing what type of changes and improvements you add over time.

I started filling the data up but I got disappointed to know that I can’t find other relatives in the database, outside my own family tree. I thought I could link my tree to others who were previously unknown… it would be a form of getting to know lost relatives, and a much faster way to expand the family tree. Since it will probably stop growing when it gets to my great-grand parents, since they’re all dead, and don’t use the internet. Too bad.

Maxim: Starting a family tree on Geni is simple: just go to http://www.geni.com/ and add yourself with the small form in the middle of the page. (The form is labeled “Start Here.”) Click the Add button to become the first member of your own tree, and then click the yellow arrows to add more family members.

Anonymous: We made sure to include half-brothers and half-siblings in the experience — the trick is to add all the parents first (click a right or left yellow arrow to add multiple spouses) and then click a down arrow to add the children. You’ll then see a menu of all available parent combinations to choose from.
If you added all the children to a single pair of parents, no problem. You can click the “edit info” link for each child, and on the dialog that appears, you’ll see a drop-down menu containing that same list of all parent combinations.

Jason: We have some great ideas for expanding the Geni experience to personal websites and other pages, but we want to be sure we address concerns about privacy first. We’ll be asking our beta users for guidance with features like that. Thanks for your comment.

Laura: Thanks for trying Geni. One of the great things about creating a product like this is that we can test it out with our own data. Since many of us have “Brady Bunch” families, we spent extra time to make sure those family structures were easy to create and view.

Looks great! Already loaded what I know and will have a few family members give it a try.
Something I’d suggest – Make a version for FRIEND groups!! I have “groups” of friends, some may know each other, some may not. You can connect them together, and use THAT as a great visual tool for your online network. You’ve already got fields for all their contact info (AIM, MySpace, YouTube).

WOW! Very friendly, I currently work with another tree software, but it does not allow interaction with family, as most family members like to peek and play but aren’t serious about genealogy. I will definitely be playing with this site.
A suggestion since it is in Beta, anyway to add a health feature to track family diseases. This has been one of my gripes about most software.
Otherwise, I can’t wait to add my tree, and watch it grow.

Geni.us! Congrats from Me.dium. We love what you’ve done…

Guys,
Absolutely wonderful job!
You seem to “borrow from the best” web sites out there. I see some obvious nods to LinkedIn.
I predict that you will be wildly successful.
Are you looking for investors?

I have truly enjoyed this site. I found myself just adding more and more family members … over 50 now. I’m curious to find out if two family trees will eventually be combined? I guess there’s only one way to find out. I better write some letters to the ancesters in Ireland.

I am amazed! I am one of those family members that wants to preserve history and connections and this is exactly what I have been dreaming of. Your investors are going to make a killing. So on the import features, are you also going to support export in true “its your data” fashion?

Hi,
great stuff! but, ÆØÅ are shown in the profile, but not in the tree…
:morten

Hi all!
Great work! Just a little problem with accent for french people like me!
Jérémy

I love Geni! It is so easy to use that even my dad knows how to work with it

What if I have parents, but they are not (and never have been) married? They are now listed as being married, but that’s not true.

Great site, always wanted to track my family genealogy tree. Will this site be in other languages like Russian, Latvian and so on ?. Noticed one problem, when I enter name in Cyrillic, it isn’t showing in my tree, just a blank rectangle.

Great site, a French colleague refered it to me after reading about it in TechCrunch. I personaly love all things relative to new visual interfaces and your site remembers me about http://www.cogmap.com/ which does a similar work for org charts. Org Charts and Genealogy Trees are so widely accepted and understood that it is difficult to use other visualization approaches to describe organizations and families. This may be one of the reasons why matrix organizations are hard to set in place or navigate … I will talk about your site in my blog on visual language http://www.uswim.net .
Congratulations for a job well done and good use of Ajax.

Same comment as Shawn Scott: let’s face it, having a child together doesn’t necessarily make the two people husband and wife. I will have to refrain from sharing my tree with my family until I can add my “illegitimate” cousin in a proper way.

One last comment … your website doesn’t display accentuated letters (like in French) and I could not type arobases and dots, I had to copy/paste them (I use Firefox 1.5 on a PC)

Geni is Live!

Geni is live! Like I posted hereunder, I really expect a lot of this website. It starts very intuitively, you just need to enter your name and it unfolds to allow you to let you enter your parents, then you find out you can e-mail your relatives to e…

There doesn’t appear to be any way to indicate a marriage between two people who are already on the tree. For example, my Dad’s sister was married to my Mom’s brother, so I have “double-first” cousins (we share the same set of grandparents). I can add a spouse to my Mom’s brother or my Dad’s sister, but then I have a duplicate aunt or uncle.

Design Flaw:
Cant seem to add different mother to my first son who is not born of my current wife.
Cant add 1/2 sister without being prompted to select her parents as my dads current wife.
???

This is great and I want to use this, but not all families are 100% heterosexual. We should be able to same-sex spouses.

Great site! It rocks. For some reason I can’t delete someone from my tree. The person’s box has an X on it. I click it, site refreshes, yet person remains. Help! My aunt was never divorced! When she sees it she’ll be mad.

Great! And it would be better if you also add Russian Language

Awesome site. I hope it supports the UK keyboard layout soon as I keep having to do SHIFT + 2 instead of SHIFT + ‘. Not being able to see the cursor in the box means I have to go back and delete half the address when I realise I’ve typed it wrong… again!
Other than that amazing site so far! I hated only being able to see direct relatives in other programs. I always want to see the whole thing.

This is pretty neat. Running a tad slow right now. I have an aunt that was added as a spouse and an ex-spouse of my uncle and can’t delete the extra despite my best efforts, though I expect its just an easy bug. But I’m really excited about this. Looks great.

Q: If two family members independently start trees, and then later find out about each others’ tree – is there a way to join them?

You Guys Rock !!! your site is great and the concept is really cool,
For the next steps this will be cool to have the abilities to embed my Tree to display it in our blogs !!! like a youtube video, it will make a lot of visits to your site, and make our trees grow

top 20 requests:
1) Gedcom import and export
2) Gay marriages and not-marries relations
3) School system in profile is US based, cant be filled
in by people from other countries
4) deleting images does not update the screen
5) linking from anyone to anyone else in the tree (in case
of mistakes)
6) API to do lots of cool stuff
7) emailing temporary password takes a few hours e-mail restriction on “dot” in e-mail address
9) other languages support: dutch, spanish, russian,…
10) printing reports
11) copy and paste works only after typing the first letter
12) no accents and special characters
13) country listbox should be freeform or ajax
14) marriage between people who are already in the tree
15) some people use the same e-mail address
16) more help on how to delete persons
17) explanation on the (future) merging of trees
18) travestites are not blue or pink… hahaha
19) option to add text to the e-mail being send to
relatives (e.g. translated text)
20) a forum to post this on!!

Jérémy, Morten, Stefan, Amaury de Buchet: We’re working on accents and expanded language support!

Brilliant! Sounds like the beginning of a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I can’t wait to see it gain a userbase, so that the information becomes even more valuable.
I’m new to the online genealogy game, but this interface is really simple. There is another comment here about importing existing genealogical data from other databases; that sounds like it would be a huge shot in the arm to building up Geni’s data — is that in the works?
Keep up the great work!

Tried your site and it is a great concept. Ran into a few problems.
1) If make a mistake in a persons email addr, you can’t change it. This is also importnat since people change emai addresses.
2) I noticed that photos uploaded to an entry are sometimes truncated, sometimes at the top other times at the bottom.
3) After I added my last entry, I can no longer view any trees. It displays message at upper left “undefined’s tree 0 people”, abd also navigation info, but no tree
4) When I entered the last person, the add never completed, but I find that person in the “List” three tiomes. I need to delete the extraneous entries
5) window display times are extremely slow. It takes 2-3 minutes to save changes in the profile and another 2-3 minutes to display the next page.
6) Also found that when I enter the birth order for a person, you change the order to something else. The value varies depending on the other persons entered. For example, I entered my son born secons and indicated so. When I looked at it again, it said only child.
7) I have some people that use the sam email address. If I try to enter that address again it is rejected. This is a necessary evil. You can warn of the address already being in use , but shouls allow the user to accept it anyway.
I realize this is beta code, but I would like to point out an wrrors I see so you can make it better, Hope you don’t mind.

I like this a lot, especially because it should allow multiple members of my family to add people to our family tree. My sister’s more into this than I am, and my parents know more names & relationships than I do, so it should end up being pretty cool. Of course, it’ll get really exciting if our tree ends up merging with that of some more distant relative!
Problems I’m bumping into (besides major slowdowns):
1. Occasionally, when I add someone, it adds two of that person. Just a glitch, I’m sure, but it’s happened to me twice in about 18 people.
2. Is there any way to change the order of the marriages? I have an aunt whose first husband died and second marriage ended in divorce. I added them in that order, but the first husband has the red line, in spite of my having changed his status from “Current spouse” to “Former/late spouse.”
3. It’s inconsistent with recognizing people as dead. I add a spouse, uncheck the “Living” box… but they don’t get a dotted line. I check their personal info, and they’re marked as not living, but they’re still marked as “Current spouse.”
4. Why do lines between spouses sometimes connect from the sides of the boxes and other times from the bottoms of the boxes? It doesn’t have to do with children, because I have it both ways in families with kids. That visual inconsistency is just bugging me, because it looks like it’s denoting some sort of difference…
5. It would be really nice if there were a quicker way to change the birth order numbers, rather than having to go in and change the info on each individual person. Especially with how slowly the site is operating. In the meantime, how about if it just increases the birth order number by 1 for every sibling added? My Dad was listed as a 1, but all 3 sisters of his that I added were listed as 2′s. Either increment the number each time or just leave it blank, in my opinion.
Thanks again! I’m looking forward to seeing this develop! Especially if it speeds up…

I am LDS and many people in my church do geneology. One of the things we keep track of are baptisms and other specific religious rites. Is there a way you can add a piece of software that would allow us to add events and corresponding dates?

I’ve been waiting months for someone to build this website!
In the future, is it possible to show a geographic overlay, like google analytics? My family is spread out all around the globe and it would be interesting to see how we’ve dispersed.
Also, I’m interested in the utility of this site for the study of genetics, linguistics, sociology, and ethnography. How long before users can analyze your data in this meta sense? I am interested in studying the diaspora of ethnic and cultural groups around the globe, viewed over time.

this is an amazing software
Is there some forum or bugzilla to report bugs or suggest features ?

It would be helpful if other schools (elementary, middle, high school, etc) could have a tab for “Add another”. Some people move around a lot during childhood!

Create your family tree

Former COO of Paypal David Sacks has returned from a successful dabble in hollywood where he produced Thank You for Smoking) a Golden Globe Nominee.  Sacks new venture is a family tree website called Geni – hardly a new concept since it has bee…

Armand: If you have relatives with multiple marriages/partnerships, you can just keep clicking the right-hand or left-hand yellow arrows to add as many relationships as necessary. Once you have added those relationships, you can click on a downward-pointing yellow arrow to add a child. Each time you add a child, you’ll be presented with a menu to select that child’s parents — from all available couple combinations.
Thanks for trying Geni!

Great site overall! I’d like to add my vote for the top priority feature requests…
My family started adding to my tree as soon as I sent out invitations. They didn’t realize how many people I had already added (100+), and we now have a few duplicate entries. How soon will you have delete and combine features?

Paul Horne: Did you click the downward arrow displayed on the person with the multiple marriages? If you clicked on the new husband (in this case), then his child would have only one possible mother (since he only has a relationship with one woman) and the new child would appear between that couple.
In any case should be able to delete that child from the tree, provided she doesn’t have a spouse or children of her own. Just look for the “X” icon in the upper right of her rectangle.
If you are still having problems, please click the Contact Us link and send us a message referring to your comments in this blog. Thanks!

Dear sir,
Indeed this a great work you have done. Enough of information has been loaded and this will help to locate others those who are part of the tree. Remarkable idea in the world of information tecnology.
Keep up Please,
M.K. Kalra

I would definitely buy a bunch of glossy poster of my entire tree if you made it available. I think it would make a great gift to send to every family in my tree.

I think the distinction between “former/late spouse” and “current spouse” needs to be clarified somehow. Sad though it may be, every spouse will eventually be a late spouse, especially if you go back a couple of generations. However, doesn’t it seem strange to put a dotted line between great-grandparents who were married their whole lives?
To put it another way, my paternal grandfather died. My paternal grandmother is still alive. This is hardly an unusual circumstance. She has not remarried. Should I list him as my grandmother’s “current spouse” or “former/late spouse”?
My maternal grandfather and grandmother are both deceased. Should they list each other as “current spouse” or “former/late spouse”?
You see the confusion here? If I’m doing this properly, should every marriage between one or more deceased people have a dotted line?

Carl Jonard: We are working on finer levels of description for relationships, and you’ll see that in Geni very soon.

To reiterate a few of the above suggestions:
1. Add the ability to have multiple grade schools, high schools, colleges, etc. and allow insertions into the sort order. Re-sort the listings by date.
2. Consider the same for jobs.
3. Occupation only shows once at the top of Jobs. Consider storing an occupation for each employer.
4. Add a “as of date” for current location that defaults to today.
5. Display the maiden names of the females or enclose the maiden name in parentheses.
6. Why show 12 inches on height– you should increment to the next higher foot.
7. Display a calculated age when you’ve entered the birthdate. Add this calculated age to other events (when you add them, like marriage). This would help catch entry errors, like a marriage date for someone 9 years old…
8. Add a marriage function that inserts the date/place into both partners of the union.
9. Set up some defaults for Country and possibly state when entering birth/death/marriage to speed the process.
10. Allow direct entry of numbers if you don’t click the pulldown– i.e. I’d like to put in a date of 26 directly, rather than having to mouse the pulldown or enter “2″ seven times.
11. When you tab past the last entry field of a screen return to the top of the screen.
12. Adding parents to a married female should default to her maiden name.
13. I’m currently entering “events/facts” into the biography field. Could you add a separate place for these (graduation, awards, marriage, etc.) with a date field and perhaps an indication for a text note field (further description) and an indication that a source exists (with its separate description). A predefined list of common events/facts would be great with the ability to add your own to the scrolling list.
14. Allow date ranges (1912 – 1913) in case you’re not quite sure of a date but know the range.
I sure wish I had some of the above features before entering the plethora of information I’ve already done.
Keep up the good work!

Just stumbled up on this site and it’s wonderful! I love that family members can collaborate to update information.
One idea I have: in addition to ‘tree’ or ‘list’ views, it would be great to have a ‘map’ view, which shows where your family originated from.
I was born in France of English, Reunion Island, and Indian ancestry, and my husband was born in the US of German ancestry. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to see our family paths charted on a map?
Thanks for the great tool!

Simplified visual representations of organisations : from 2D models to 3D models ?

I recently successively discovered 2 cool sites : first CogMap, an Ajax-based wiki to share org charts (eg Goggles), then Geni, an Ajax-based website to share family trees (source Techcrunch). Why am am writing about this here ? Have you noticed h…

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