. . . a single, collaborative world family tree . . .

No Fred we can´t change or manage our historial persons that we are manager for!!!!!!!! You know I had to ask you for help, don´t you remember Fred?

I remember, but others can and Geni staff assures that it must be possible, so it will be a bug in your settings. Ask Mike Stangel for help !

He won´t help me, I am not a payer...

Steve, believe me, Mike Stangel is a perfect guy, always friendly and helpfull. However he is technical, he does his best on all fronts.

If you want to add ancestors to your tree outside the 3rd ggf then I can help you, make the first to add ancestor a brother of yourself and add all relatives to him you want. As you are ready, I remove the connection wiht you and make the connection at the right place !
if you have edited ancestors who are more direct to you than to the primary manager I can make you the primary manager.
If you cannot find or edit a Geni public profile, you can find it through Google and then edit it.
So the possibilities are endless if you have the right help !

I have added over 8,000 names to this sight. Just because I don't have money to go pro shouldn't mean that I can't add any more to the tree

Private User non pro users can as much add to the tree as pro users, only it is easier for pro users because they don't need help. If you want the same you need the help from curators or other pro users.

Steve Harald Styrbjörn Gattulf Palmqvist I'm happy to help if I can, but I lost track of this thread... how can I help?

Ancestry did the same thing; it started out free, or at least rootsweb did, then rootsweb was bought by Ancestry. I can't access the information I myself put up unless I pay - and occasionally do, by the month, when I have the time to devote to it 24/7. But Geni is awful. I am a Pro member, yet for more than a year I haven't been able to get back in a GEDCOM (in any form) all of the information I put up here myself! Never mind all my so called 'ancestors' going back 10 or more centuries that I'd connected with, not that I believe it's accurate, but it's still fun. I've had it here. Another cousin calls them grave robbers - he entered his information by hand only to have it hijacked last year when Geni changed the distant profiles to public ones. His tree is a mess now, and the research was started by his father more than 50 years ago. So now Geni has become like Ancestry, and will sell your own information back to you for a hefty fee. Not to mention allow others access to profiles they can change at any time, whether the other people think the info is correct or not. I won't mention any names...

I think what Geni did was slick, they got us to do the work now we are of no use to them anymore. i have ghost following me around projects. dont know who they are! never said a word, dont participate in anything and creepig me out.

they started off on facebook having everyone pay, except to add people to your tree so why should we be surprised there was a motive to the madness

Daear Mike "19th cousin twice removed" thank you for your offer, but I can´t ask you everytime I fin a new child to one of my ancestors etc. those persons I am the manager for but now are not able to manage myself. After 4th generation it is not possible to add any more new found children and parent. You know Mike this is waht researchin your family is, it takes time and suddenly there is a breakthrough and one have got new names of children and parent , new wifes and husbands etc. this is what I and many of us can´t do now and we can´t everytime write to you or other people to ask you to help us or open your "homepages" 8or what it is called?) so we can edit our ancestors and relatives. We have not missused geni but geni have missused us. Thabk your for asking cousin but this help you can´t give me,cause i can´t knock on your door everytime. I have to do it in hand instead than doing it on geni! Best regards from your old cousin Steve with a thanks!

Peter......
I agree. If we cannot add to our own tree, then I guess we are done.

It will be up to curators and curious Georges who pay for the PRO
that will be merging and correcting.

It is ok.....but a disappointment

Ethel Johanna Myers

Non pro users can use now all pro users rights if they visit a library with the new Geni possibilities

http://www.geni.com/blog/announcing-geni-public-access-369917.html

This is great!
Now I can do my research at home, because all the archives go digital and then I have to go to the library to record my findings. ;-)
(provided of course I can persuade them to apply for a geni public access account and they have a static IP-address).
I love it!

Sorry Fred, my sarcasm is not directed to you.
But this is a nice service for libraries and so on, but by no means a solution for cutting down the rights of non-pro users.

Something strange is going on with a profile that I need merged and was hoping someone could help. The make public tic seems to be missing on John Atkins Hymas profile. If someone could possibly make him public and complete the following merge, I would surely appreciate it.

http://www.geni.com/merge/compare/6000000002102701979?from_flash=1&...

Thanks!

It is meant to get new pro users; it isn't meant to be used by old non pro users, but nobody can stop them to use that opportunity !

Private User

Susan Jill Hymas is the manager, since juni not online, not giving any response on my demands, the profile is private within familygroup, so usual tricks will fail !

Fred Bergman

That's pretty strange. I can edit the profile, but just can't make it public.

then you are in the familygroup, I'm not, but if you add me to your familygroup I can retry it !

No doesn't matter, I'm allready in your familygroup !

About the merging issue I wrote on the blog: "(..) Some merge requests can not be executed because the profiles are private and the manager is a free user (and occasionally login in or even abandoned (...)"

George from Geni picked this one up

@Wouter - we understand the private/non-Pro thing is a pain point. Hopefully the product team doesn't hate me when I get back to the office and relentlessy bug them about this.

So let's hope they find a solution, because now it's very complicated to have these profiles to be merged ;-)

The public access is nice for some people, but is no solution for many non PRO users.

It would help if Geni made it easier for a family-group that has a least one PRO member to work together and then remove some some of the limitations for non PRO family members.

If non PRO members could add to all profiles of PRO members in their family-group, non PRO members could still work on the big tree with the help of a PRO family-group member. I think it could motive people to become PRO members, where you would otherwise lose who families on Geni.

re: @Job Watereus: "The public access is nice for some people, but is no solution for many non PRO users..."

In one sense, I thoroughly agree; it's is currently very difficult for non-Pro members to even "flag" or "identify" potential merges of profiles within their near-family (even just parents & children!) group. That needs to be improved (IMHO).

However, without making "older" profiles automatically public (...and the details of "older" need to be hashed out...), then it REALLY becomes difficult for an extended family to find where & how they connected into the "Big Forest" without making lots of profiles which then later have to be merged.

My "attitude" is that 'private' profiles are solely to protect the privacy of living persons. (I haven't yet read anything significant -- to me -- for why "older" profiles should be private.)

What would it take for there to be a family group pro manager working on behalf of his or her family group?

@Erica I. H.: re: "What would it take for there to be a family group pro manager working on behalf of his or her family group?"

From what little bit I've played with this scenario, I would think the non-Pro members would have to be able to search for possible matches without them yet being "linked" by some 'N' previous generation -- or, to be able to search for that 'N' previous generation.

Just 'thinking out loud' -- another mechanism for this approach might be for the 'Pro' user to be somehow "made known" to the other (extended) family members who are entering profiles, and that Pro-user could be added (by the non-Pro users) as their default "Private Profile Collaborator" --- in other words, this special 'collaboration' role would act like a family member (in being able to merge and modify those particular profiles ... even private ... just as the manager would, while still including the other Pro capabilities (which would also include the capability of connecting the "family" into the "Big Forest").

Other thoughts? Improvements on this possibility? Additional restrictions?

It would be this ability to co-manage private profiles which would be different from the current Pro capability for public profiles.

If making older profiles public would be adapted by Geni. They should communicate this all their users. It should be clear what one had to do to prevent a profile to become public and users should get enough time to act on the communication.
I think profiles for living persons should not be made public in some automatic way, but only after human intervention.

Profiles for the big tree are always public. If adding to a profile with a match would be impossible for a non PRO member that would keep the number of potential duplicate profiles low.
A (family) PRO member would have to look at it and merge or indicate that there was no match. After that (other) family members could start adding profiles again.

re: @Job Waterreus - "I think profiles for living persons should not be made public in some automatic way, but only after human intervention."

I agree -- the only 'catch' is: How do you know they are not living? That 'automatically public ... and not living" criteria is what has to be clearly defined.

There are two reasons:

The most important is privacy of living people (which is why private profiles).

2nd in importance is the viewing/merging of profiles in the "Big Forest" (which is why public profiles and the automatic "making public" of profiles which meet certain criteria).

@Dan H. Cornett

Each profile has a status Living or Deceased that could be used a primary source for determining if a person is alive ore not.

Furthermore I think it would not be unreasonable to say that each generation will mean at least 15 years and persons will not get older then 120 years old. That would limit the persons who could be alive.
There could be some other rules as well like parents are at least 12 years old when they get their first child, a woman will not get a child when she is over 60. A child cannot be born more then 1 year after its parents have died, the max difference in age between children of the same mother can not be more than 50 years and with the same father no more than 80 years. Meaning that a living status for profiles who do not confirm to these rules would probably be incorrect and should be checked by a human.

Profiles could also have an incorrect deceased status. May be there could be rules for checking that as well, so that those would be checked by a human as well when there could be doubt about the status being correct. Like when there is no death and/ no burial date and there is no way to determine the person has been born more then 120 years ago.

@Fred Bergman
I was working on my Nijman-ancestors and I was doing just fine until Geni pulled the plug.
Apparently it is thought that users like me are creating lots of duplicates (which I did in some cases) and other f-ups and that PROs, and maybe curators?, are not.
I checked the Nijmans that do not belong to my tree and noticed that
you manage many Nijman-profiles. A great many of them are duplicates if not triplets. How come?