As we prepare to welcome in the new year, now is the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing things we have accomplished in 2014. And what a year it’s been!

Take a walk down memory lane with us as we reflect on the highlights from 2014.

The year got off to an exciting start when we teamed up with best-selling author AJ Jacobs on his journey to hold the world’s largest family reunion in history. Through Geni and MyHeritage, AJ has made some incredible discoveries. He has found that he is a distant cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, Albert Einstein and many, many more in Geni’s World Family Tree of over 83 million people. To make it even easier for Geni users to find how they are related to AJ, we created the AJ Jacobs Cousin Connector to automatically calculate your relationship path to AJ!

The Global Family Reunion will take place June 6, 2015 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, New York and everyone is invited to join in on the festivities. Before the big day, take some time to join the Global Family Reunion project on Geni to meet other relatives, receive updates from AJ and see what you can do to get involved in the family reunion that’s sure to make history!

We were also very excited to announce that Geni had teamed up with BillionGraves to launch a global crowd sourcing initiative to digitally preserve the world’s cemeteries. We have always been committed to creating the definitive family tree of the world to preserve the world’s family legacy for future generations. This global initiative is another great way for Geni users to contribute to the future of family history research, and to help preserve their own family legacies, as well as the legacies of others.

We rallied the Geni community and encouraged them to join us in using BillionGraves to preserve and document gravestones worldwide for future generations. And you heeded our call with volunteers reaching far and wide to preserve their local cemeteries.

In June, we had lots of fun attending the 45th annual Southern California Genealogy Jamboree right here in Burbank, California. We were thrilled to see old friends, meet users and introduce some first timers to Geni’s world of collaborative genealogy. Curator Randy Schoenberg stopped by and helped connect geneablogger Dick Eastman to the World Family Tree!

The next month we were happy to share the experiences of West Valley Middle School’s history class and their journey to discover their family heritage. Using Geni and our sister site WorldVitalRecords, and led by their teacher, John Martin, these middle school students got a taste of the wonders of genealogy.

This September we introduced multilingual profiles on Geni! This powerful feature enables our international community to enter names and biographies in multiple languages. We store them separately and display them in your preferred language. As custodians of the World Family Tree, this enhancement helps bring all of us closer to realizing the goal of building the definitive family tree of the world.

And just in time for the holidays, we made enhancements to our photo uploader to make uploading family photos faster and easier than ever before. Now you can quickly add multiple photos at once from your computer, tablet or phone either by dragging and dropping the photos into the gray box or by clicking the gray box to select the files you want to share. With our newest enhancements to the photo uploader, you’ll be able to share hundreds of more photos easier and bring your family tree to life.

It’s been an amazing year and we couldn’t have done it without you! We’re thrilled to continue working on enhancing collaboration and bringing you more tools to further grow the World Family Tree. With more and more profiles and historical records added to the tree everyday, Geni’s Word Family Tree is quickly becoming an even better reference family tree for the whole world.

We’re proud of what we have achieved this year and we can’t wait for you to see what’s in store for 2015!

Happy New Year!