News

We recently updated the way privacy works on Geni. These new, simpler privacy rules are designed to provide more privacy for your close relatives, while enabling greater collaboration on historical profiles. You manage the privacy of the profiles you’ve added to your family tree. Under the new system, profiles you’ve added — out to your third great grandparents and fourth cousins — have become private profiles. Private profiles are profiles that only your family and… Read the full story

Our latest release included the following enhancements designed to improve merging on Geni: Send merge requests to your collaborators – When you don't have permission to merge a profile, you can send a request to any of the profile's managers to complete the merge. Now, on public profiles, you can also send the merge request to any collaborators that you have in common with a manager. This will help you direct merge requests to the… Read the full story

In association with our new sources feature, we’ve made the following enhancements to our documents feature: New text document type Now you can create a text document without leaving Geni. When adding a new document, just select the Create a New Document tab: This will bring up a new, empty text document. You can type, or cut and paste, the text of your document, and then click save: You can even edit the text later…. Read the full story

We recently released following bug fixes and enhancements: Single field date entry – Look for the new single field date entry option in the advanced tab of your tree preferences. Enable this setting to replace the drop down menus for dates with text fields when you add new people to the tree. You can enter dates as "January 15, 2008" or "1/15/2008". You can choose to use MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY as your date format. We're… Read the full story

Geni.com makes the cut, yet again.PCMag.com, has included us in their list of The Best Free Software of 2010. You will find us included under the “Fun/Home” Category.

We're taking the site down again for a couple of hours tonight for maintenance. We expect the downtime to begin at 8PM PST. Update: Geni.com is back online. We don't expect any further downtime in the near future.

UPDATE: Geni.com is back online. Thanks for your patience. Geni.com will be down tonight starting around 8PM PST. The site should only be unavailable for a few hours – look here for updates while the site is down. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Last night between 11:00 PM and 6:00 AM Pacific Standard Time we experienced some downtime. However, all Geni servers are back online now. We apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused you.

Some Geni users may experience problems loading pages.  This began at approximately 4:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. Please bear with us as we work on a solution. Update 9:15 AM PST All Geni servers are online. Thank you for your patience.

Your Geni home page highlights your family’s recent activity and gives you easy access to important Geni features. Today we’re introducing a redesigned home page. The new, simpler design makes it easier for you to find what’s important to you. (click to view larger image) The first thing you’ll notice is that there are now two columns instead of three. On the left you’ll see your family news in a new, wider format for better… Read the full story

UPDATE: And we're back. Sorry for the inconvenience. We're taking the site down for maintenance – should be just a few minutes. We'll let you all now when we're back.

We've recently rolled out some requested changed to profile photos. If you use the identify feature to indicate where a person is in a photo, we'll now use that part of the photo for their profile. If you use the resize photo option in the tree, we'll use this as well. This means you can now, for example, use one group photo as profile photos for everyone in the photo. We're converting existing identified photos… Read the full story

Posting a link is an easy way to add a link to any web page, such as a census record or grave image, to a relative’s profile. Today we’re making posted links better by making them part of our new documents feature. When you post a link, we’ll take a snapshot of the page you are posting and display it just like other documents on Geni. This means you can view the page without opening… Read the full story

One of the most important aspects of genealogy is documenting your research through sources and citations. Today we’ve taking an important step towards adding sources to Geni by adding support for documents. Documents are a great way to add census records, ship manifests, birth certificates, and more to your relative’s profiles. Just like photos and videos, you can add date and location information and tag documents to add them to related profiles. Supported file formats… Read the full story

Faster Navigation The next time you visit Geni you’ll notice that our navigation bar has a fresh new look. The old tabs have been replaced with a clean navigation strip. But beauty is more than skin deep, so we’ve also made some changes to help you get where you want to go faster. Inbox is now a top level link so you can see how many messages you have from every page and view them… Read the full story

Users who have experienced compatibility issues with our standard video uploader can try our new High Quality video uploader. Because this uploader encodes the video on our server rather than on your computer, it should be compatible with virtually any computer configuration. If you’ve had issues uploading photos in the past, please try the new uploader and let us know how it works. Upload a video with the high quality video uploader

Find person – When viewing a large tree it can be difficult to find the person you are looking for. Now you can type shift-f and enter the name of anyone in the tree you are viewing to jump directly to that person. Shift-F requires that the flash app have the keyboard focus, so with some browsers you'll find that you need to click somewhere on the tree (preferably the blank area between nodes) before… Read the full story

We've just released some nice merging and collaboration enhancements: Add manager – Use the "Add manager" action under the more menu on any profile you manage to add a manager. This will send a request to the user. If they accept, they will be added as an additional manager (you can choose to make them a primary or an alternate when you send the request). You will not lose management privileges. Relinquish management – When… Read the full story

Collaborating is a way to work with other Geni users on the historical parts of the tree without exposing your privacy or your family’s privacy. When you invite another Geni user to collaborate with you, you can view, edit and merge the profiles they manage, and they can do the same with profiles that you manage. Note that this excludes profiles for living people. If you find a profile that you’d like to edit or… Read the full story

We’ve just added a new rotate button to all of your photos. Use this button to rotate a photo after you’ve uploaded it to Geni. Each time you use the button the photo will rotate 90 degrees clockwise. No more tilting your head to look at those photos! View your photos

The list of the most popular Geni profiles for the month of December is now available. The top ten includes a former US President, former US Vice President, several actors, a few musicians, and a writer. Can you guess who they are from their profile photos? View any of these profiles to see if you’re related. And don’t forget you can share those profiles on Facebook. View December’s 100 popular profiles

In the three years since we launched Geni we’ve added a ton of features such as videos, timelines, recent activity, and now public discussions. All of these features have been added to your profiles, but the basic design hasn’t changed. This has led to some overcrowding, making it more difficult to find what you want on a profile. Today we are rolling out a new profile design with three goals: Make information easier to find… Read the full story

Geni is designed to be a collaborative genealogy tool, enabling users to work together to build out their family trees. Today we’re releasing a new feature, Public Discussions, to help you find and communicate with other users. Because anyone can view and participate in Public Discussions, you can easily tap into the combined knowledge of millions of Geni users around the world. To get to Public Discussions, first click on your home tab, then the… Read the full story

We've created Geni Labs to let users experiment with features that we're working on. These features are not officially supported by Geni and they may be updated or removed at any time. However, we hope that our power users will find them useful. Your feedback on these features will help us refine them and determine whether or not to introduce them as official Geni features. The first Geni Labs feature is one that has been… Read the full story

To help our users celebrate the holidays this month, we’re making all virtual gifts free until the end of the year. So go ahead and send someone a champagne toast, some Hanukkah Gelt, a Santa Hat, or any of our dozens of gifts. Send a free gift now

Along with public discussions, the new profile, translation, and free gifts, we've released a few fixes and enhancements: Our family includes all managers – Users in your family group now have permissions on all profiles you manage, even when you are not the primary manager. Merge issues filters are sticky – The advanced controls on your merge issues list will remember your settings when you leave the page and then return. Invite your friends to… Read the full story

Update: Geni is back and fully operational. Go to your tree CORRECTION: This will take longer than 5 minutes but should not take any longer than 30. Updated at 3:30 PST PM —————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Please note that we will be taking the site down tonight at about 9pm. This should only last about 5-10 minutes while we make some quick enhancements to the site.

The list of the most popular Geni profiles for the month of November is now available. The top ten includes the current US President, a former US Governor, a Queen, four Hollywood celebrities, an aviator, a popular media figure and one Biblical figure. Can you guess who they are from their profile photos? View any of these profiles to see if you’re related. And don’t forget you can use the “Send this profile” link to… Read the full story

Two features that were previously available to Pro users only are now free for all Geni users: Statistics Now all users can view the entire suite of fifteen statistics for their ancestors and blood relatives. From average life expectancy and country of birth to most common first names and surnames, now you can learn about your relatives in a visual, easy to read format. Every chart is also a link to the list of names… Read the full story

When you view a profile we search other trees to find matching profiles. We've enhanced this matching algorithm to greatly increase the accuracy and reduce the number of false positives. Although accuracy will never be 100%, in some cases we've seen the new algorithm cut the number of bad matches by 50% or more. Note that the new algorithm will only update the match count when someone actually views the list of matches for a… Read the full story

Recently we introduced your family address book. This is a great way to collect all of the contact information for your relatives in one convenient place. We've made this list even more useful by adding an export feature. Use the "Export as CSV…" on the bottom left of any page of your address book. We'll generate the list and send you an email when it is ready for download as a CSV file (comma separated… Read the full story

The list of the most popular Geni profiles for the month of October is now available. The top ten includes the current US President, a former US President, a Queen, five celebrities, and two Biblical figures. Can you guess who they are from their profile photos? View any of these profiles to see if you're related. And don't forget you can use the "Send this profile" link to post interesting profiles to Facebook, Twitter, or… Read the full story

The new family address book gathers all of your family’s contact information into one handy list: email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Use the last name index to jump directly to relatives with last names that start with a specific letter. There are two ways to add more data to your address book. Use the quick edit link in the actions column to quickly add details to one person. If you’d like to quickly add… Read the full story

We’ve added two new features to the tree: a five-generation horizontal tree and an advanced add node form. The horizontal view is an easy way to see a profile’s ancestry in a compact format and it makes tree building much faster. You should not have to wait for a tree redraw after adding a node. The advanced add node form, which replaces the "more" version of the add node form, allows you to add a… Read the full story

Now you can view your 100 most popular ancestors and blood relatives, sorted by popularity. This is a great way to find interesting new relatives. Who knows, you may find that you’re related to royalty or someone famous! Also look for the new Top 100 badge. This indicates that the profile is one of the most popular of all Geni profiles. Click the badge to view all popular profiles. View Popular Profiles  

List Filters Now you can hide profiles in lists that don’t have a Photo, Child, Spouse, Sibling, or Parent. Click twice for the red x and those profiles will be excluded from your list. Resolve Duplicates If you find a person in the tree with duplicates in their immediate family, use the resolve duplicates option in their more menu. This will open a mini-tree where you can drag the duplicates on each other to merge… Read the full story

We’ve added ten spooky new gifts just in time for Halloween. Let your family know your thinking of them by sending them one of these ten new gifts: And don’t forget, Pro’s now get unlimited free gifts. Send a Halloween gift now

Discover interesting Geni profiles with the new popular profiles list. View the most popular profiles in your family or in all of Geni, and choose the time period to see who is the most popular recently, all time, or in a specific month. The most popular profiles in the last week include 1 talk show host, 2 US Presidents, 2 Biblical figures, 6 Kings and Queens, 1 Mayflower passenger, and 1 of the richest men… Read the full story

Have you ever wanted to let your friends know about a profile you’ve found on Geni? Maybe you discovered that you were related to someone famous, or just come across an interesting new relative. Use the new “Send this profile” link on any Shared profile to post the profile on facebook, twitter, or dozens of other services. You can also send the profile as an email message. After you click the send this profile link,… Read the full story

We’ve added a new way to find other Geni users also interested in the profiles you browse. When you view a profile you’ll notice a new list of users who have recently viewed that profile. You can click their name to view their profile and contact them. If you see someone’s name appear a few times on profiles you’re viewing, their is a pretty good chance that you are working on the same part of… Read the full story

Profile Name Display Recently we added name preferences to let users choose how they want names displayed on Geni. Users told us that they missed viewing the full name on profiles so we’ve changed it back. Now profiles always display the full name, including middle name, last name, and maiden name. Undo Pending Merges Users have also told us that they often come across pending merges that they can complete but not undo. This makes… Read the full story

Geni.com experienced network difficulties starting the morning of Tuesday, October 20th. Users may have experienced Geni pages that did not load due to network timeouts. The site was taken down at 3:45 PM Pacific time to investigate, and was brought up and down several times through the evening. Our engineers worked through the night to trace the problem and restore service, and Geni.com was brought back online at 4:30 AM Wednesday morning. At no point… Read the full story

Wednesday morning update: Geni experienced network routing failures overnight. The site was put back online around 4:30 AM Pacific time. No data was lost during this period. We are sorry for any difficulties you experienced during this time, and will have a more complete update later today in another blog post. All site features are functioning normally at this time, but if you experience site instability, please let us know at help [at] geni [dot]… Read the full story

Data Drill Down Every statistic now includes a link to drill down into that data behind the chart or tag cloud. You can even click on the chart itself to view the profiles for a particular piece of data – a slice of a pie or bar chart or a name in a tag cloud. For example, here is the Country of Birth chart for my blood relatives: From this chart I can: View the… Read the full story

Based on user feedback we’ve made a number of improvements to our recently enhanced lists: Free Sort Controls We’ve moved the sort controls to the column header and made them available at no charge to all users (sorting was previously a Pro only feature). To sort a column click on the up (ascending) or down (descending) arrow next to the name of the column you want to sort. These sort controls will appear when you… Read the full story

All Geni Pro subscriptions (new and existing) now include unlimited virtual gifts at no additional cost. Virtual gifts are a great way to show someone that you care, and can be sent with a birthday or anniversary greeting, or “just because”. With subscriptions available for less than three dollars per month (when prepaid), you can save money even if you only send a few gifts a month. Upgrade to Geni Pro

Improved Pending Merge Interface Pending profile merges now use the newer side by side format. Multiple pending merges will all appear at the bottom of the merge page so you can quickly resolve multiple merges. When you act on one pending merge the next one will automatically load for review. Use the carousel of pending merges at the bottom to jump ahead to a specific pair. Better Conflict Permissions The Tree Conflict icon now only… Read the full story

Name preferences now appear in your settings as well as your tree settings and apply sitewide. The default is still to show maiden name in parenthesis in the tree and not show maiden name on the rest of the site. However, you can choose to always show maiden name across the site if you would like. We display a warning message when a living person is more than 125 years old, there is a death… Read the full story

UPDATE: We're back! Geni.com will be offline for a few minutes. We'll let you know when we are back.