Author: George

Family History month begins on Sunday in the US, and to celebrate we are running a month-long giveaway with daily prizes for genealogists and family history enthusiasts.  Signing up is easy and there are lots of prizes to go around. For each day of October we’ll be giving away a one-month Geni Plus account to the lucky winners, and on the last day of the month (Halloween) we will be awarding a grand prize…for now,… Read the full story

Record Partners One of the most important aspects of genealogical research is accessing record collections to find hints and facts about your ancestors and family members.  And one of the challenges of the research is that these record collections exist in many places around the world, both on and off the web. As part of our efforts to create the best platform for genealogists to work together to build a single world family tree, we… Read the full story

Update March 2014: For current membership offers and subscription pricing, please visit the Geni Help Center. Today we are introducing a new subscription package called Geni Plus. The Plus account offers many of the perks of Geni Pro at a fraction of the cost.  Geni Plus is a monthly offering priced at $4.95 USD, or about 40% of the cost of a monthly Geni Pro subscription. Among the many benefits of Geni Plus are: No… Read the full story

Tonight (Monday, August 22, 2011), GeneaBloggers Radio will host a special live call-in episode with Geni’s CEO, Noah Tutak.  The episode will air at 9pm ET (1am GMT), with a large portion of the episode dedicated to Q&A with listeners. According to GeneaBloggers Radio, “we’ll be discussing some of the recent changes to how Geni works for both their free (Basic) users and their paid (Pro) users as well as the reaction to such changes…. Read the full story

We’ve received a lot of feedback on the changes that we recently made, and we’re happy to announce some enhancements based on your feedback. The loudest feedback we heard is that users were having trouble finding profiles of their close relatives and other profiles that they added to the tree. It was never our intention to make it difficult for users to find these profiles; users could still find these profiles through our auto-suggest tool… Read the full story

When we made last week’s account changes, we understood that some Geni members would not be able to upgrade to a Pro account to continue using features like merging and site-wide search.  Today, we announce the Geni Public Access program, and we hope that this will provide an opportunity for more users to experience Geni Pro.  Grant and I (with the help of several users) have been testing this functionality all week at the IAJGS… Read the full story

Update March 2014: For current membership offers and subscription pricing, please visit the Geni Help Center. At Geni, our vision is to empower the genealogy community to create the world family tree, the single largest, most accurate, and comprehensive family tree in existence. Thanks to the efforts of our curators and power users, the world family tree is fast approaching 60 million profiles, and is more accurate, better sourced, and has less duplication than ever. And we’re just… Read the full story

As many of you are aware, we experienced some unexpected downtime this past weekend. First, we want to apologize to our amazing community of genealogists for inconveniences that the outage may have caused. Our goal is to provide the best place for all of you to work together to build a single family tree of the world, and we failed to provide that service for more than 48 hours over the weekend. Our engineers worked… Read the full story

Geni Pro users can now edit public profiles!  (Read more on the blog…)  For more info on Pro accounts, click here.

  (Update 6/30/2011:  There is some confusion about the scope of this feature.  Only public, unclaimed profiles can be edited by Pro users).   Geni’s goal is to build a single family tree of the world. We believe that millions of users working together is the best way to create an accurate and complete world family tree. Of course, working with other users mean that you get some bad information, along with the good. This… Read the full story

Between different conventions and different languages, dates can be a tricky subject for genealogists (and everyone else for that matter).  This week we introduced “single field dates” to help Geni users input dates without as much guesswork. Setting your date format in Localization Settings To set your preferred date format, go to your Settings page and click on Localization Settings.  You’ll see the following options: For this example, I’ll use the YYYY MM DD format…. Read the full story

We have two positions available at our West Hollywood, CA (USA) office, and we’d love it if you helped spread the word to any local folks who may be interested. The positions are: Director of Monetization Customer Service Representative Info about all open positions at Geni can be found at http://jobs.geni.com. Thanks!

Last summer we introduced the ability to view revisions on Geni, and shortly before Christmas we added the ability to view and revert text revisions for profiles, surnames and projects. Today marks our next major “revisions” release:  profile revisions. When you click on the revisions tab for a profile you will see this interface, which allows you to view the revision history and revert to previous values for each of the profile fields displayed.  A… Read the full story

In addition to the new profile revision features, today we released some enhancements for sourcing profiles on Geni. All sourced fields on a profile show a document icon; hovering over the icon will display a hover card containing the document providing the evidence for the field: The ‘Edit Profile’ screen also contains the document icons with hover cards. The ability to add sources is a little easier now, too.  When you click on the Add… Read the full story

Today we released profile revision features and additional document and source features, as well as some additional enhancements that make Geni better for our users. Set your time zone Now you can set your time zone, and over the course of the next few weeks we will update timestamps across the site to reflect your local time. To set your time zone, visit your profile and click on ‘Edit Profile’.  In the next screen, you have… Read the full story

Can you tell it’s been a busy week at Geni?  Today we released several big changes on the site, including some additional revision features and a new interface to help you keep track of the various discussions you follow. Perhaps the biggest changes in this release are for documents and sources.  These updates will make it much easier for users to add/manage documents, including easier features to mark a document as a source for important… Read the full story

Revisions are important way to track changes to profiles, trees, and more on Geni. In addition to tree revisions and profile revisions, we’ve added three new lists of revisions to provide greater visibility and accountability. Home Page Revisions Tab You can now view revisions for everything you follow, from profiles to projects, by clicking on the revisions tab on your home page: Make sure you follow the profiles, projects, and surnames you’re interested in to… Read the full story

Keeping track of all of the discussions you follow can be difficult.  Today we released some features to make it significantly easier to stay updated on your discussions of interest. “Discussions I Follow” The new default view for discussions will contain a list of all discussions you follow, sorted by most recent activity.  All discussions you follow will be included in this list: public discussions, private discussions, project discussions, and any discussions where surnames that… Read the full story

Amos is related to Kevin Bacon! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Updated 1/24/2011 to include conferences in the United Kingdom. Updated 3/16/2011 to include AAHGS. I was doing some preliminary conference planning yesterday and I wasn’t able to locate a reliable list of genealogy conferences for 2011.  Since I was making the list for myself, I decided to turn it into a blog post (and project) for the benefit of anyone else who is looking for a similar list.  Please use the comments below if there… Read the full story

We’re not halfway through January and everyone is gearing up for conferences already!  Here are this week’s links: The Genealogy Sphere The Suzanne Winsor Freeman Memorial Student Genealogy Grant (The Family Curator) – Please pass this link along to anyone student genealogists you know. RootsTech 2011 Announces Lineup of Keynote Speakers (We Tree) – We’re only a month out! Options for Becoming a Credentialed Genealogist (About.com) – I bet there’s somebody who’d be proud of… Read the full story

Today we released a new enhancement to the merge center: the ability to filter the profiles.  The feature is very simple to use.  Above the merge center on the right, you’ll now see a Viewing: drop-down menu. This drop-down provides the ability to filter the profiles in the merge center by various Projects, as well as a few options that are specific to the individual user. The My Relatives option displays only your relatives in… Read the full story

We were off last week due to the holidays here in the states.  Below you’ll find lots of links from the end of December to start your new year! The Genealogy Sphere 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy: Thanks for Playing (We Tree) – The conclusion of a great series by Amy Coffin. GeneAwards 2010 (Tamura Jones) – Geni was awarded the GeneAward for Most Improved Product of 2010 by one of the more astute tech-genealogy… Read the full story

As we prepare to usher in the New Year, we thought we’d stop and take a look at the last twelve months to see what has been accomplished on Geni…and the list is quite impressive. The Big Tree Steady growth of the Big Tree has been a constant in 2010.  We started the year with more than 30 million connected profiles, and that number has increased more than 60%.  In fact, there’s a chance that… Read the full story

Update 4:00 PT: Service has been restored.  Our apologies for the brief inconvenience. 3:35 PT: We are experiencing a temporary outage.  Our engineers should have the site back up very shortly, please check back soon.

The past week has been a very active one for the technology side of things, including a couple really big announcements last week from our engineers at Geni 🙂 The Genealogy Sphere More celebrities sign on to trace their genealogy (Denver Post) – Guests are revealed for the new season of Who Do You Think You Are. Tracing the Past Street by Street with AddressingHistory (Programmable Web) – Very interesting app for Scottish researchers. Distance… Read the full story

Prior to Wednesday’s release of the Geni API, we had been working closely with several Geni users to test the API functionality.  Today two of our users, Daniel Walton and Grant Brunner, share some thoughts about the API. The straw that broke the camel’s back We had been planning to create the API for some time, but it hadn’t yet become a priority.  A little more than a month ago, Noah noticed an interesting discussion where… Read the full story

Note: This short post is a cross-post from the Geni Engineering blog.  The topic is less relevant to genealogy and Geni users, but we wanted to share because we know a lot of you are tech enthusiasts. We released our translation features six months ago and quickly saw our community translate Geni into 20 different languages.   Since then, Geni has been translated into 70 different languages with over 150,000 translations.  It has been amazing… Read the full story

In less than three years the Geni community has created nearly 100 million profiles, including almost 50 million that are part of the Big Tree.  Among all of those profiles, there are more than 3 million unique surnames on Geni. Today we announce the addition of Surname pages to Geni.  Surname pages create a central point of discovery for profiles, projects, documents and discussions that are related to any given surname.  Geni users can follow… Read the full story

We’re quickly approaching the end of 2010, which means two things:  (a) lots of family time in the next few weeks, and (b) it’s time to start planning for the 2011 conference schedule. The Genealogy Sphere Genealogists are easy people to shop for (The Joplin Globe) – Lots and lots of easy, thoughtful gift ideas for genealogists. National Genealogical Society planning for 33rd conference (Mormon Times) – It’s time to start planning for this year’s… Read the full story

Another fun week in the world of Genealogy.  I never thought I’d mention Christopher Columbus and Martha Stewart in the same recap! The Genealogy Sphere Use holiday get-togethers to fill out family tree (The Arizona Republic) – As this will be my first holiday season home as a genealogist, I’m planning on spending some time with my extended family to work on my tree 🙂 Genealogy: Save, save, save; copy, copy, copy (Coshocton Tribune) –… Read the full story

Note: We’re a day late with this week’s recap due to some wi-fi issues at the coffee shop, but amidst those issues I met my first Geni users out in the wild! Thanks to the two sweet ladies who stopped by my table and told me how much they like the service. I’ll make sure I have some goodies to give out next time I meet any of you. -George The Genealogy Sphere Ancestry.com’s Growth… Read the full story

Last Wednesday’s interview subject, Dear Myrtle, sent us this press release yesterday regarding a project with the intent of making genealogy data a little bit more portable.  The BetterGedcom project “will be to develop an update/replacement for the de facto GEDCOM standard based on input from end users and developers world-wide. Long-term efforts will include standards for the sharing of genealogical information over the internet, for example,” according to Myrt. We can confirm that GEDCOM… Read the full story