Changes to Membership Tiers & Merging

Membership Tiers

Geni has always offered a free Basic account to our members. This is a great way to give Geni a try and see how quickly your family tree can grow. As your tree grows and you want to take advantage of advanced features, such as profile matches and tree merging, you can choose from two subscription levels, Plus and Pro.

We’ve made two changes to these membership tiers to make them easier to understand, and provide more value to our members.

Tree Size

We’ve moved from a relationship-based limit to a simple number limit. The relationship-based limit was difficult to understand, and was overly restrictive, especially for users interested in adding ancestors, rather than cousins and other living relatives.

Now Basic (free) members can build a tree with up to 100 people. This means a user tracing a single ancestral line can add 99 generations with a Basic account, rather than the 5 generations previously possible.

A Plus membership increases your limit to 1,000 people. If you upgrade to a Pro subscription, there are no size restrictions to your tree.

Search

Users who upgrade to Plus can now take full advantage of Geni’s advanced search feature to search all 110 Million profiles on Geni. Plus and Pro users can search for profiles by name, date, location, and more.

Merging

When trees overlap on Geni they can be merged together to create a single, more complete tree. Usually this happens when a tree grows large enough to overlap the World Family Tree, and a Pro in the World Family Tree merges the trees.

Based on user feedback, trees can no longer be merged without the permission of someone in that tree. This means that your tree will no longer be merged into the world family tree, or any other tree, until you, or someone else in your tree, is ready to merge your tree. Users in other trees can send merge requests to other trees, but someone in that tree will need to approve before the profiles and trees are merged.

This is a significant change, and we hope that it will better accommodate users interested in working on their own trees, while maintaining the ability to grow the world family tree over time.

Note: These changes have no impact on viewing permissions and you will still be able to edit profiles you collaborate on.

We welcome feedback from our users. If you would like to let us know what you think or offer some suggestions, please post your comments here.