News

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. On July 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire invaded Serbia, beginning a war unlike any others. The devastating war would last 4 years and see the deaths of more than 9 million soldiers. Do you have ancestors who served in the Great War? From now until the end of July, MyHeritage is offering free access to the following military record collections: Silver War Badge… Read the full story

We’d like to inform you of some important upcoming changes to Geni’s privacy rules. These changes are intended to enhance the privacy of profiles you want kept private, while at the same time move Geni closer to the widely-accepted genealogical practice of collaborating by sharing information about deceased persons. Changes to private profiles The privacy of private profiles will be increased. Private profiles will now display less information to non-family members: The name will be… Read the full story

Each year the U.S. celebrates Memorial Day in honor of the men and women who have given their lives while serving in the U.S. military. In celebration of the holiday, MyHeritage is providing free access to millions of military records all weekend, from May 23 – 26. Celebrate this Memorial Day by learning more about your military ancestors. Journey back in time to some of the most important conflicts in world history that not only impacted… Read the full story

Best-selling author A.J. Jacobs is organizing the largest family reunion in history and you’re invited! Image: United Purpose A.J. Jacobs is a journalist, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, and author of four New York Times bestsellers. You may recognize him from his book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, in which he chronicles the year he attempted to follow all of the rules in the Bible…. Read the full story

Geni and our parent company, MyHeritage, recently announced a global initiative with BillionGraves to digitally preserve the world’s cemeteries. This past Sunday, our good friends at MyHeritage headquarters headed out to the Segula Cemetery in Petah Tikva, Israel to digitize gravestones using the BillionGraves mobile app. With 80 eager MyHeritage employees out in full force, the team got a real hands-on experience using the app and came away from the experience with some great ideas… Read the full story

We’re excited to announce that Geni has teamed up with BillionGraves to launch a global crowdsourcing initiative to digitally preserve the world’s cemeteries. In the world of genealogy, gravestones play an important role in telling us information about our ancestors. They can not only provide the name, birth and death date of the deceased, but also the names of close relatives. Epitaphs often provide insight into the person’s life, and may include a brief description… Read the full story

The good news keeps rolling in! We’re excited to share with you that 815 million U.S. Public Records of people living in the United States have been added to MyHeritage’s growing collection of historical records. You can find these records available to you through Record Matches on your Geni profiles or in SuperSearch™, MyHeritage’s powerful search engine for historical records. With information that spans the last five decades for hundreds of millions of people living… Read the full story

We’re excited to announce that more than 160 million new U.S. and UK historical records have been added to MyHeritage’s growing collection of historical records. These new records are available now in your Record Matches for your Geni profiles and through SuperSearch™, MyHeritage’s powerful search engine for historical records. These records come from hundreds of collections containing vital records for births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, military records, censuses and much more. What’s new?   For the… Read the full story

We’re thrilled to announce massive discounts on DNA tests. As technology for DNA analysis has advanced and hit the mainstream, DNA tests for genealogy are now much more affordable. Today we’re happy to say that we are passing on these savings directly to you. With a simple cheek-swab DNA test, you can be on your way to making discoveries you never knew were possible. Discover your origins and find new relatives – DNA matching can… Read the full story

As we prepare to welcome in the new year, we thought it would be fun to reflect on some of the amazing things we have accomplished in the last 12 months. We’re proud of the many exciting new features we introduced this year to help you research your family history. While we all work together to build the largest and most accurate family tree of the world, genealogy research on Geni has never been faster or… Read the full story

Researching your Nordic heritage? We’re excited to announce millions of digitized records from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland have been added to MyHeritage’s burgeoning collection of historical records. Spanning from as early as the 1600s, these records are available now through MyHeritage’s SuperSearch™ and will be matched to your Geni profiles using MyHeritage’s powerful Record Matching technology. These collections contain over 90 million names and include birth, death, marriage and baptism records as well as census… Read the full story

Here’s some excellent news to add to your Halloween festivities – millions of gravestone records and obituaries are now available to Geni users through Record Matches and MyHeritage’s SuperSearch™! This new addition includes 5.5 million gravestone records from BillionGraves and 3.5 million obituaries from Tributes.com. Using MyHeritage’s powerful matching technologies, Geni users will receive Record Matches whenever these new records match your family tree. These records will also be accessible directly through your relatives’ Geni… Read the full story

When we first introduced Record Matches and Smart Matches™ on Geni, we promised that additional historical record collections would be coming in the future. Today we are excited to announce that our parent company MyHeritage has entered into a strategic partnership with leading genealogy organization FamilySearch; this partnership will bring billions of global historical records and family tree profiles spanning hundreds of years to MyHeritage. What does this mean for Geni? These new additions to MyHeritage’s… Read the full story

Great news – we’ve just made Record Matches and Smart Matches™ smarter with new Value Indicators. This enhancement is designed to make your matches more useful and save you time. You’ll recall that Record Matching automatically finds matching historical records for your family tree from MyHeritage’s growing collection of billions of newspapers, birth, death, census and other records. Smart Matching™ automatically finds matches for your family tree in MyHeritage family trees so you can discover new… Read the full story

Our goal at Geni has always been to create the world’s largest, most comprehensive world family tree. Through the collaboration of millions of genealogists, we’ve seen tremendous growth in our World Family Tree, with millions of profiles added and merged in the past year. We’re thrilled to announce that Geni’s World Family Tree now has over 70,000,000 profiles connected! In the last few months, we’ve brought some amazing features to Geni to help make your research… Read the full story

This Monday, May 27, the U.S. will celebrate Memorial Day in remembrance of the men and women who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. military. In honor of the holiday, MyHeritage is providing free access to their most popular collections of U.S. military records. Journey back in time to some of the most important conflicts in world history that not only impacted families in the U.S., but millions of families worldwide. From now… Read the full story

Recently, we added SuperSearch™ to Geni to enhance your family research experience. Today we’re excited to tell you about an even faster way to research your genealogy on Geni – we’ve added a “Research this person” link to the Matches module on your relatives’ Geni profiles! “Research this person” link on a profile (click to zoom) Clicking on this convenient link will automatically take you to MyHeritage’s SuperSearch™ results for that profile. There’s no need… Read the full story

We’re excited to announce our latest enhancement to your family research experience on Geni – MyHeritage’s SuperSearch™! SuperSearch™ will bring you even greater access to billions of historical records to enrich your genealogy. SuperSearch™ is a family history search engine that lets you search billions of historical records and millions of newspaper articles. With over 4 billion records including birth, marriage, death, burial, census, military, immigration, yearbooks, plus scans of the original documents, SuperSearch™ will… Read the full story

When we first introduced Record Matches and Smart Matches™ on Geni, we told you that you could look forward to additional collections of historical records in the future. Today, we’re happy to announce that the entire collection of U.S. Federal Censuses are now available to Geni users through Record Matches. This collection is the nation’s largest and most important set of records and includes a huge searchable index and all scanned images of the original census… Read the full story

When Geni joined the MyHeritage family in November 2012, our combined teams started working together to bring the best features of MyHeritage to Geni. Today we’re very excited to announce the first fruits of this work – perhaps the most important new feature on Geni since we launched the site in 2007 – MyHeritage’s powerful Record Matching and Smart Matching™ technologies are now available on Geni! Two new technologies for Geni Record Matching automatically finds… Read the full story

RootsTech 2013, one of the biggest genealogy events of the year, is just around the corner. Between March 21 – 23, the Geni team will be at the RootsTech 2013 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike any other conference, RootsTech provides you with the unique opportunity to connect with industry experts and discover the latest tools and techniques for researching your family history. From genealogists to developers, RootsTech offers hands-on workshops, presentations and more… Read the full story

We’re thrilled to announce that DNA tests for genealogy are now available on Geni! Take your genealogy into the new millennium with this cutting-edge technology to enhance your family history research. And for a limited time, we’re offering you a special discount on this revolutionary technology! Have you hit a brick wall in your genealogy research? You can break through these brick walls by identifying your direct paternal line (Y-DNA), direct maternal line (mtDNA) and… Read the full story

Now is that time of year when we look back and reflect at what we have accomplished in the last 12 months. Here’s a little trip down memory lane as we remember a few highlights from 2012. We started 2012 with an amazing experience at Rootstech 2012. We had a great audience for all of our sessions where we were able to enthusiastically share power of collaboration in genealogy. It was also exciting to see new and… Read the full story

Yesterday, we shared with you a few charts illustrating the amazing response we’ve received from users since announcing that Geni is joining the MyHeritage family. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Geni’s World Family Tree now has 66 million people connected! Reaching this milestone would not be possible without the collaborative effort of millions of genealogists around the world. Congratulations to all of our users for your hard work! Check out the World Family Tree page to… Read the full story

What an exciting week! Since we announced that Geni is Joining the MyHeritage Family! we’ve been overwhelmed by the warm congratulations we’ve received from the genealogy community. Even more exciting is the response that we’ve seen from Geni users; a surge of users have visited the site to add and invite new relatives and merge their trees. We wanted to share a few metrics with you to give you an idea of how great the response… Read the full story

This morning around 7 am PST Geni experienced a site outage. After yesterday’s exciting announcement, we experienced a great increase in traffic from people eager to check out our latest enhancements. Unfortunately, this led to an issue which took longer than expected to address. Rest assured, we’ve fixed the problem and as of 10:40 am we’re back up and running. We want to emphasize that no data was lost during this interruption in service. We apologize for… Read the full story

We’re happy to announce some exciting news for our community: Geni is joining the MyHeritage family! Geni will continue as a separate product, focused on collaborative genealogy, but with some great new resources and features we’ll be rolling out to users in the coming months. Geni launched in 2007 with a big idea: working together with other people is a better way to discover your family history. Over the last five years our amazing community… Read the full story

Throughout history, people have been on the move. Now we can actually “see” our ancestors cross the ocean blue to North America or make the long voyage to Australia. A new video created by Whitehead Institute in collaboration with the genealogical website Geni.com shows the births of millions people, from the Middle Ages through the early 20th Century, as single dots on a black background. As time advances, those births define the coastlines and countries… Read the full story

October is Family History Month! Celebrate the occasion with Geni by signing up for a Geni Pro membership. From now until October 31, when you sign up for a Pro membership, you can give any relative an exclusive invitation to upgrade to a 1-year Pro subscription at 50% OFF! With Geni Pro, you can add unlimited relatives to your family tree, access tree matches and merge duplicate profiles to connect instantly with new branches of your… Read the full story

Better Tree Matches Today we’re excited to announce smarter Tree Matches. When another user adds information to their tree about a relative that you both share we use tree matches to alert you. A sophisticated algorithm based on dates, names, immediate family and more is used to decide whether the profile in the other tree is match to your relative. We’ve spent a lot of time improving this algorithm over the last few months, and… Read the full story

Today we’re excited to introduce Facebook Social Sharing on Geni – a new way to share your Geni experience with your friends and family! Have you ever been working on a Geni project and wish you could share your progress with your friends? Or perhaps added your latest census discovery to your ancestor’s Geni profile and wanted to share it with your genealogy Facebook buddies? Facebook Social Sharing will easily allow you to share your… Read the full story

Celebrate Labor Day with Geni by working on your family tree! Between August 31 – September 3, you can add unlimited people to your family tree for FREE! Whether you’ve welcomed a new member to the family or discovered a new branch of ancestors, here’s your chance to add their place in your family tree. Add as many people as you can because you get to keep each new addition to your tree at no extra charge! And remember to… Read the full story

Today we’re releasing enhancements to merge requests and projects that’ll make collaboration a little easier. Read below for the details. Approving Merges We’re making it a little easier to grow your family tree by expanding permissions for approving merges to everyone. For a limited time, all users will be able to approve a merge for free. This means that Basic and Plus users will be able to complete merge requests for private profiles and unconnected… Read the full story

Today we released some minor changes to Family Group and a few bug fixes. Take a look at our full release notes below: Enhancements: Your Family Group now only consists of Geni users. What this means is: Your Family List will only show people who have joined Geni Your Calendar will only show relatives who have joined Geni and your living close relatives Other enhancements: You can now see your family’s birthdays and anniversaries for the entire year in your Calendar. Simply… Read the full story

Today we are rolling out the latest enhancements to Geni Projects. Now there are even more picture and video options for projects! Read more about these changes below. Add More Pictures and Videos You can now add multiple pictures and videos to projects. Click on Photos & Documents to view all the photos, documents and videos tagged to a project.   Here you can easily view all the photos, documents and videos that have been… Read the full story

Did you miss the live stream of Noah Tutak’s presentation at RootsTech? No problem! The video for his entire presentation is now available. Click the video below to watch “Privacy in a Collaborative Environment.” Description: When we work together on genealogy, we’re no longer are constrained to “My tree” or “Your tree.” Suddenly, we’re all working on “Our tree.” In this presentation, Noah Tutak, CEO of Geni.com, will explain how to properly handle private and public… Read the full story

Update March 2014: For current membership offers and subscription pricing, please visit the Geni Help Center. Today we’re announcing some great enhancements for our basic (free) members that will make Geni better for the whole family. Free Gifts for All Birthday and anniversary gifts are now free for everyone! Help your family celebrate their special day by sending them a birthday or anniversary greeting accompanied by a special gift that will make your message truly standout. Add… Read the full story

Today we’re excited to announce the first step in some major new enhancements to Geni Projects. Projects were first introduced over a year ago as a way for users to organize and work together on groups of related profiles. We think you are all going to love our new changes to Projects. Check out the enhancements below! A New Look   We’ve given our Projects page a makeover. Featured Projects are displayed right at the top… Read the full story

RootsTech did a great job streaming several of the presentations live. Did you catch Noah Tutak’s session online? Here are the slides to his presentation, “Privacy in a Collaborative Environment.” Description: When we work together on genealogy, we’re no longer are constrained to “My tree” or “Your tree.” Suddenly, we’re all working on “Our tree.” In this presentation, Noah Tutak, CEO of Geni.com, will explain how to properly handle private and public data in a… Read the full story

We had a great showing for each of our sessions at Rootstech. For those of you who couldn’t make it to our presentations, we’ll be posting the slides to the blog throughout the week. Be sure to keep an eye out for all four presentations! Below you’ll find Michael Berkovich’s presentation, “Better Genealogy Through APIs.” Description: With the advent of online and cooperative genealogy, APIs have become vital in the progression of the industry. In… Read the full story

We had a great time meeting everybody at Rootstech in Salt Lake City, Utah. Charles and I were joined by our CEO Noah Tutak, CTO Justin Balthrop and our amazing engineer Michael Berkovich. We had a blast talking to many Geni users who stopped by the booth. Many even came in Geni T-shirts! The first day kicked off on a high note. In Thursday’s keynote, Geni was mentioned during the announcement of a new Chrome browser… Read the full story

Record Search We’ve made it even easier to search for records from Archives.com, Find A Grave and GenealogyBank on Geni. You can discover even more about your relatives by entering more information for more accurate search results. To start your search, simply click on the Research tab at the top of the page and select Record Search. Enter in your relative’s name, birth surname, location and birth/death dates and click Search Results to start searching… Read the full story

With the New Year upon us, we thought this would be the perfect time to reflect on some of the great things Geni has accomplished in the past year. 2011 in Retrospect We spent the first couple of months of 2011 further enhancing and refining popular features. Enhancements to documents, sourcing and projects have really helped to make it easier to share and collaborate with other users. As the year progressed, we pursued features to… Read the full story

Update: We’re back! (6:02pm PST) We’ll be down for scheduled maintenance for approximately 1 hour beginning at 5pm PST tonight. Thanks for your patience.

We’re excited to announce the Geni Celebrity Quiz on Facebook! Have fun as you discover surprising celebrity cousins while testing your knowledge of celebrity trivia. Challenge your friends on Facebook and see who can achieve the highest scores. We’re kicking off our Celebrity Quiz with five trivia games: Academy Award Winners Child Stars Stars of the Small Screen Kings of Comedy Who Said It? Be sure to check back each week as we add even… Read the full story

Looking to make the most out of your family gatherings this holiday season? Geni is celebrating the holiday season with our exclusive 12 Days of Christmas promotion. For the next 12 days, we’re giving you the chance to give a Geni gift membership to anyone on your tree for 25% off! A Geni gift membership is the perfect opportunity to get your family to help you with your research and fill in the blanks on… Read the full story

Our goal at Geni has always been to create the world’s largest, most comprehensive world family tree. Through the collaboration of millions of researchers, we’ve seen tremendous growth in our World Family Tree, with over 10 million profiles connected in the past year. We’re thrilled to announce that Geni’s World Family Tree now has over 60 million connected profiles and counting. Take a look at the World Family Tree page for automatic updates and other… Read the full story

Recently, we introduced Record Matches to make it faster and easier for Geni users to find records about their relatives on their family tree. Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Find A Grave to Geni’s growing number of record partners. Find A Grave is a free grave registration site with millions of records containing photos, biographies and dates. To see the record matches for a profile, click on the Record Matches button and… Read the full story

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… Read the full story

Management Options We’ve simplified profile management by combining all manager related functions into a single management options window. Look for “Manager Options” under the Actions menu on profiles. In addition to adding managers and requesting to be added as a manager, you can also remove unrelated managers from your close relatives. Geni Public Access Geni Public Access was started in August for public libraries and genealogical societies to provide their visitors with free Geni Pro… Read the full story