A Look Back at 2017

As 2017 comes to a close, we’re taking some time to reflect on this past year on Geni. We celebrated an exciting milestone, introduced new enhancements, met genealogists all around the country, and heard some wonderful stories from our users.

Here are our highlights:

This year, Geni celebrated our 10th anniversary! Geni first launched in January 2007 with one goal in mind – to create a single family tree of the entire world. Today, Geni’s World Family Tree has grown to over 118 million profiles with new trees added and connected everyday. To celebrate the exciting milestone, we gave away a free 1-year subscription to Geni Pro. We asked the community to answer the question, “What first sparked your interest in genealogy?” and had tons of entries! The lucky winner shared the story of how he was inspired to learn more about his grandfather’s family in Czechoslovakia.

This year we also released some exciting enhancements to our DNA matches. DNA matches will now display shared DNA matches between you and your match. By seeing the DNA matches you have in common, you can start narrowing down your connection in the family tree.

You can also now compare your ancestor reports with your DNA matches to easily see where your families connect.

Side-by-side ancestor and descendant reports were also added to the merge comparison page to help you better determine if the profiles are a match during a merge.

We also made it easier to create unconnected families with the new Create a Branch tool. Now, if you don’t know how a person is related yet, you can start building their family trees and work your way towards finding their connection to the World Family Tree.

Dinner with Geni curators and the Geni team at IAJGS

Throughout the year, we hit several major genealogy conferences around the country. From RootsTech in Salt Lake City, Utah to IAJGS at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida to FGS in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we had a great time chatting about Geni with family history researchers from all around the world. And it’s always a pleasure to get to spend time with our amazing volunteers curators and users in person.

For the first time we made our way to Springfield, Massachusetts for the New England Regional Genealogical Consortium genealogy conference. The conference gook place right in the hometown of Dr. Seuss! And we can’t forget our time spent in at NGS in Raleigh, North Carolina and at Jamboree right in our own backyard in Burbank, California. One of our favorite highlights of any genealogy conference is when we can help connect users to the World Family Tree right at the booth.

Speaking of making connections to the World Family Tree, we had lots of fun uncovering surprising connections between celebrities and historical figures. Oscar night in 2017 was full of family connections. The big royal news of the year was the announcement of Prince Harry’s engagement to American actress Meghan Markle. The happy couple will marry on May 19, 2018. Thanks to Geni’s World Family Tree, we were able to find that Prince Harry and Meghan are also related! They are 12th cousins once removed in the World Family Tree. And that’s not all. It turns out Meghan has a few more surprising relatives, including Mark Hamill, Susan B. Anthony, Charles Darwin, Beyoncé, and more!

It was also wonderful to hear some amazing stories from our users about some of their fascinating discoveries on Geni. Jennifer Payen wrote about her goal to unravel the mystery of her paternal grandfather and how Geni was instrumental in solving this family mystery. Sharmalan Tevar shared how he discovered that his friend was also a relative and Carole Forsman shared her desire to learn more about where her family comes from.

It’s been a wonderful year and we look forward to some new and exciting developments in 2018!

We wish you and your family a very happy new year!