News

Many of you have asked for the ability to delete email addresses from your own account or from other profiles in your tree. We have made it easier to do this. Just click "edit info". You can delete any of your own email addresses, provided it is not the last email on your account. We will introduce a "delete my account" feature soon to handle this case. If you are trying to delete someone else’s… Read the full story

Many of you requested the ability to label a significant other as a "partner" (or "ex-partner") as opposed to only a "husband or "wife" (or "ex-husband" / "ex-wife"). You can now do this by clicking "edit info". Look for the field label called "Partner" and use the pull-down menu to change how your partner is described. Your choices are now: 1) Current spouse; 2) Current partner; 3) Former/late spouse; 4) Ex-spouse (divorced); and 5) Ex-partner.

This morning Geni experienced a brief outage related to one of the fixes we released last night. If you were able to view your family tree earlier this morning, you may have noticed missing relatives or branches of your tree. We are currently updating Geni with a new version of our relationship engine, which should restore any missing portions of your family tree. Please note that no information has been lost, and Geni should be… Read the full story

Thank you again for the incredible response to Geni. As you might expect, we are currently experiencing very high volumes of customer emails. As a result, we have asked users with product suggestions to make them here, on the Geni blog. This will let other users see and comment on them, thereby letting the most popular suggestions rise to the top. We read every suggestion posted here, so your ideas will get just as much… Read the full story

Many users have requested the ability to merge trees and import a Gedcom file. It is our intention to offer both these features. However, our timeframe is 2-3 months. Why so long? Tree merging requires us to give you the tools necessary to resolve conflicts and eliminate redundancies in trees; also greater privacy controls will accompany large trees. Gedcom imports will follow afterwards as a special case of tree merging, where we give you the… Read the full story

A number of users have inquired whether Geni supports same-sex marriages, unmarried partners, or families which bring together children from previous relationships. 1. Geni trees do support same-sex marriages. When spouses are added, their default sex is the opposite of their partner. But this default can be changed by clicking "edit info". We are working on a simpler way to add a same-sex marriage. 2. While unmarried partners can be added to the tree, they… Read the full story

“Geni’s smooth interface and social features make it by far the best genealogy app we’ve seen.” Lifehacker Blog

Per your requests, we’ve made it easier to remove people from your family tree. This happens just like always: just click the little "x" symbol in the top right corner of the person you’d like to remove. However, since we’ve expanded the rules that determine who can be removed, you’ll be asked to confirm this action. Removals cannot be undone, so be sure you really want to remove the person in question! Because building a… Read the full story

As part of our recent upgrades to make the site faster, we’ve also improved the speed of our outgoing emails, which you should receive within a minute (at most) of the action triggering them. Here’s what we’d like to know: are any of our emails getting blocked by your email’s spam filter? If so, please comment on this post, and be sure to tell us who your email provider/ISP is. Likewise, if you know of… Read the full story

Geni can now recognize international letters and characters. Thank you to all of those who left feedback on this issue. If you are still having problems, please comment to this entry. Thanks! UPDATE (Feb. 3): We are aware of the problem with foreign keyboards and expect the problem to be fixed in the next week. Thank you for your patience.

Just a short note to let you know that we had our first feedback review last night, and we’re busy distributing the top issues to everyone on the team. We do read and tally every message we get in this blog’s comments and through our Contact Us form, so don’t worry if you don’t see us respond directly here on the blog. Overall, your responses have been very, very positive. We’re glad you like what… Read the full story

Thanks for bearing with us while we add more capacity and improvements. As requested, here’s an update on how we’re doing. Last night we set up several more webservers, so Geni should be performing much better for you today. (There have been a few hiccups this morning, and we’re ironing those out now.) We’re also working to address your most pressing issues, based on the feedback we’ve received. For example, this morning we added support… Read the full story

As you probably know by now, we’ve experienced unanticipated and overwhelming levels of interest at Geni, and the site has been slow all day and offline at times. We are in the process of adding several new servers, and performance should improve later today. We’ll post a new entry here when everything is up and running. Until then, please be patient, and thanks for your interest in Geni!

Our press release about the public launch of Geni is out! Please click here to read it. For press inquiries please Contact Us.

By David Sacks, CEO Hi and welcome to Geni, a new website with an ambitious goal: to create a family tree of the whole world! You can start creating your family tree on our homepage through (what we hope is) a fun simple interface. It’s extremely fast to build your tree by clicking the yellow arrows in the direction you want to add new family members. As you’ll notice, there is no software download required, no lengthy signup process, and no… Read the full story