News

The Northern California Family History Expo is being held on October 7-8 in San Mateo, California. In additon to being one of the sponsors of the event, Geni will be giving two presentations, one each day, about the benefits of collaborative genealogy. Join us for a demonstration of Geni’s exciting features and learn about what you can gain through collaborative genealogy. Here’s a look at our speaking schedule below: Friday October 7, 2011 6:30pm: Don’t… Read the full story

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

This week we’re releasing some minor enhancements and fixes, including the addition of the Report tool for projects. Users can now report a project for Spam, Inappropriate Content or as an Abandoned Project. And if you’re a Geni Plus user, you can now see your very own Plus badge on the tree! Take a look at our full release notes below: Enhancements: Added “Report” option to the Actions menu for projects. Profile hovercards added to… 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

In addition to introducing Geni Plus, we have also released bug fixes to the site. Here’s a list of fixes in today’s release. Fixes: Fixed bug causing birth surname to reset when a user edits the location details on a profile Fixed issue where burial location was not displaying on revision compare screen Birthday and anniversary gifts are now working on Internet Explorer 7 Fixed multiple pop-up issue when making a profile public from the… Read the full story

Today we introduced some improvements to the site. Details and release notes are below. Latest news box is back on the homepage. You can use this area to post updates to your family and followers. Notifications have been improved. You will now receive an email to notify you when someone starts a discussion about a profile you are following. In addition, the notification count in the header will reset to zero every time you check… Read the full story

We posted earlier this week that the tree display bug had been identified as a problem with Adobe Flash. As of today, Adobe officially released the latest minor update to Flash Player to version 10.3.183.7. Reportedly, updating to this latest release will fix the bug that caused text to display vertically instead of horizontally. Unfortunately, there is still a small bug in this release that relates to the names wrapping improperly. We’re still talking to… 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

Profile Hovercards At the beginning of the year we released document hovercards, a popular feature for quickly finding out more information about documents on Geni.  Today we added the profile hovercard, which makes it easy to find out additional information about profiles in search results. To view a profile hovercard in search results, simply hover over the link to the profile and additional information about the profile will be displayed. Profile hovercards will continue to appear… 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

Last week we introduced some significant changes to the way Geni works. Unfortunately, we did a poor job communicating these changes to our community. We should have given you more notice of these changes than we did, and for that we apologize. As expected with changes of this magnitude, there has been a great deal of discussion and feedback from the Geni community. I want to assure you that each and every comment has been… 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

In addition to our changes to Pro, today we are excited to release a cleaner, simpler header to make navigating on Geni even easier. You can now go directly to your tree with just one click! We’ve also consolidated all of your notifications to one place. Simply click on the icon to the right of the search bar to view your inbox messages, requests, tree matches and discussion notifications. You can read more about these… Read the full story

If you’re going to be in the Washington, D.C. area from the 14th to the 19th of August, please make sure to stop by the Grand Hyatt Washington to visit our booth at the 2011 IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. We’ll be there in full force with a good bit of swag to give out to all of you. We love talking to fellow genealogists and Geni users, so don’t hesitate at all to… Read the full story

Last weekend, George and I were in Kansas representing Geni at the Midwest Family History Expo. We got to talk to hundreds of enthusiastic genealogists, and a bunch of Geni fans. We had two presentations about collaborative genealogy, and we also participated with Ruby Coleman, Arlene Eakle, and Holly Hansen in a blogging panel. Everyone who attended learned something, and that means a lot to us. We’re happy to be raising awareness of collaborative genealogy…. 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

We are proud to announce some improvements to the way the name fields work on Geni.com. These changes will provide a clearer and more consistent method of inputting names.  The “Nicknames” field is now located on the Basics tab and has been renamed to “Also Known As.” “Maiden Name” has been renamed to “Birth Name.” Lastly, male profiles will now have the ability to be listed with a “Birth Name” just as female profiles can.    … Read the full story

We are always listening to feedback from our users and regularly make improvements and bug fixes to the site. While some of the improvements may not be noticeable while interacting with Geni, we want to give our users a better idea of what is included in each release. You may notice that many of these enhancements and fixes came directly from requests posted to Geni Help and our public discussions. An archive of our previous… 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

The Colorado Family History Expo is being held June 24th-25th in Loveland, CO. Geni will be there in full force, so we want to see you there. If you’ll be attending this show, please stop by the Geni booth for some great free swag, Geni demos, and special offers. If you won’t be able to make it to the Colorado FHE show, stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter accounts for all the details from… Read the full story

From Friday the 10th until Sunday the 12th, we were out in full effect at SCGS’s Jamboree 2011. We had a great booth filled with free swag and conference specials. Also, we were proud to sponsor an incredibly fun Ice Cream Social for GeneaBloggers. Don’t forget that we’ll be at the Loveland, Colorado Family History Expo. If you’ll be in the area, you’ll be able to meet the Geni team as well as get some… Read the full story

June 10th through the 12, the Southern California Genealogical Society will be holding this year’s Jamboree in Burbank, CA. Geni will be there in full force. We’re based out of LA, so we’ll be making sure everyone has a good time. If you want to get some face time with the Geni staff, this is your best opportunity of the year. If you’re not already registered, please make sure you take care of that as… Read the full story

We spent the last week in Charleston, South Carolina at NGS 2011. Hundreds of free Geni tees, onesies, thumb drives, and brochures later, we’re all back safely in good ol’ Los Angeles. Also, we were very pleased to be demoing AncestorSync with the SharingTime folks. You’ll be learning much more about that project in the coming weeks. Very exciting stuff coming out. If you’re interested in seeing Geni’s booth in person, come see us at… Read the full story

We’re in full force here at NGS. Take a look at some of the great people we’ve been working with this week. Here is Grant giving the thumbs-up with Gordon Clarke of FamilySearch: Here is Grant high-fiving Dear Myrtle:

Hey, everyone! I just wanted to take a second to remind you that we’re out in full force at NGS 2011. If you’re here in Charleston, don’t hesitate to come by, say hi, and get some really nice swag. If you’re not in South Carolina this week, play the home game by checking out our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The National Genealogical Society 2011 Family History Conference (NGS 2011 for short) is right around the corner. From May 11th to 14th, thousands of genealogy businesses, bloggers, and enthusiasts will all be in Charleston, South Carolina for the conference. Pretty exciting, eh? Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There will be panels, booths, and giveaways galore, and Geni will be there in full force. The Geni Booth We’re coming loaded for bear. We’re… Read the full story

Keeping immediate family chronology in order can be difficult when you’re dealing with profiles that have many spouses or siblings. With a new interface released today on Geni, you can update the order simply by dragging and dropping. Here’s how: In the tree view, edit the profile you’d like to update. Go to the relationship tab, and you’ll see the current order of the spouses. To update the order, click the “Change Marriage Order” link…. Read the full story

Naming conventions can be very different between cultures. Our last name pre-population is based on common American traditions, but we realize that it doesn’t work for every user. As of today, Geni now allows you to turn off the automatic generation of the last name field on new profiles. Here’s how: In the tree view, go to the Preferences tab, and then go to the Names section. Now check the box that says “Do not… Read the full story

The folks at Progeny Genealogy have a product called Charting Companion. It takes the information from your family tree, and allows you to make a wide variety of charts. Available now is a version that will read your data directly from Geni. If you’ve been dying to print out different visual representations of your family tree, this application is for you. It has fan charts, pedigree charts, hourglass charts, and many more. You can buy… Read the full story

The Options drop-down menu on any given profile page has been moved. Now when you load up a profile page, the Options drop-down will be in the top right-hand corner right next to the Follow/Unfollow button. This is much more easy to find, and we think you’ll like it a lot.

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

Want to come meet the Geni staff, and get some neat swag? Well, that’s easy. We’re going to be at two big genealogy conferences coming up soon. The National Genealogical Society 2011 Family History Conference will be taking place May 11th-14th in Charleston, South Carolina. We have secured a booth at this conference, and we can’t wait to see you there. The 42nd Annual Southern California Genealogy Jamoboree will be held in Burbank, California between… 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!

Our engineers are always working to make Geni better. When a lot of updates are happening like yesterday, there is occasionally points where Geni.com won’t be available for a short period of time. To better serve you, we’ve implemented an Uptime monitoring system that you can follow on Twitter (@GeniUptime). If you’re not a Twitter user, just keep your eyes right here on the Geni blog. As soon as we update the Twitter account, there… Read the full story

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

RootsTech was pretty great. If you didn’t get to go out and experience it in person, we hope you can get the gist of it from us. Here is the last bit of pictures from the conference floor. I hope you like ’em.

Jason over at Truscape. The mobile development panel. My cool-guy Family Search Developer Network Badge. Roots Magic Gordon Clarke from Family Search. Ping Pong at the Microsoft booth. Generation Maps George and Amos at the Geni booth.

Geni is here in full force here at Roots Tech. We’re rocking our booth, shaking hands, giving out swag, and attending panels. If you’re here in Salt Lake City, please stop by to say hello, and get some swag. If you’re not in the area, stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter pages to play the “Home game.” We have a lot of exciting things coming, so keep an eye out.

Have you ever wanted to show off to your friends how big your family tree is? If you’re a member of the World Family Tree here at Geni, you now can embed an ever-updating ticker that shows off how big the “Big Tree” really is. If you’d like this widget on your site…   Join the worlds largest free family tree     You just have to paste a snippet of code wherever you’d like… Read the full story

Hey, everyone, I’m Grant Brünner. As of today, I am officially part of the Geni Team. I’ll be working with all of you as the Community Evangelist. What, exactly, does that mean? Well, here is what I’ll be doing in the next couple of months: Going out, and meeting with fellow genealogists at Genealogy Conferences. Writing articles for the blog. Talking to current users of Geni. Interacting with the genealogy community on the whole. Creating… 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

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

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

Yesterday we took a look back at Geni in 2010.  Today we’d like to share our vision for the coming year. Geni’s mission is to create a shared family tree of the world. We continue to believe that getting as many people as possible to work together on a common tree is the best way to achieve this goal. We are committed to developing the best collaborative genealogy platform to enable this crowd-sourced world family… Read the full story