Geni Launches!
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 fees.
There is another key advantage of Geni: When you add a relative, you can also enter his or her email address. In that case your relative will receive an email inviting him or her to join your tree. By clicking a link, your relative will be taken to the same family tree you’ve been working on, but re-centered from that relative’s point of view.
Your relative can then add other relatives, and so on. Your tree will continue to grow as relatives invite other relatives.
Whereas conventional family trees show only your direct ancestors, your Geni tree includes siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. The hope is to identify not just your common ancestors but all your living relatives and in-laws. This makes Geni different from the many great genealogy sites which already exist.
Once you’ve built your tree, you can create an individual profile which allows other relatives to learn more about you and stay in touch. Over time Geni plans to layer on additional family networking features like photo sharing so you can stay in touch with your family network.
We know that privacy is extremely important whenever family is concerned. So we’ve set a rule that the only people who can see your tree and your profile are the people in your tree. Over time, Geni will roll out more specific privacy settings so you can determine exactly who sees your information. We know this will only become more important as trees get larger.
Many other features are in the works and will be introduced in the coming months. For instance, we know you want to be able to print your tree in a high-quality way! And when separate trees start to overlap, we will want to give you the option of merging them.
As you may have noticed, there is a little “beta” symbol next to the Geni logo. Basically, this is industry shorthand for saying “our site is new, so please bear with us if you encounter any problems!” We will work hard to resolve any issues as quickly as possible.
So what do you think? We really want to hear from you, our users, not only about any problems you encounter but also about any feature ideas or requests that you have. You can email us directly by clicking the “Contact Us” link in the footer of the website, or feel free to leave comments to this blog, which will continue to be the official place for news and announcements about Geni.
We hope you enjoy Geni!
Genealogy Discussions
Genealogy Projects
Popular Genealogy Profiles
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The Geni Blog
The World Family Tree
Many people have half-brothers and half-sisters. Why doesn’t geni account for this? Major design problem.
Are there any plans to add features like embedding your family tree into a personal website?
Congratulations!
Will you support import of GEDCOM data? I don’t think I want to redo all of the years of work I’ve put into my The Master Genealogist database.
this looks excellent, however, i see no place to create an account. i’m using firefox 2 on a mac, just in case that helps.
It’s a great idea, very smooth functionality, but one glaring problem: there’s no provision for same-sex spouses. Please make that a priority. Thanks!
Geni: Everyones Related
the brainchild of former PayPal executive David Sacks, Geni does for genealogy what Cogmap is doing for organizational hierarchies. the collaborative online-tool for building family-trees is Flash-based and persuades new users with a very low entry-bar…
Can i hide my profile from others? including name? I want to only my family know my data.
I just got set up with an account and I really love what you’ve done with this site. The interface is very intuitive and easy to use. I look forward to seeing what type of changes and improvements you add over time.
Congratulations. This is absolutely fantastic.
For the last few months, I’ve been wondering when someone would create an AJAX geneology site. You’ve done a great job with it.
Best of luck with your launch. I’m really happy with it and look forward to my family’s additions to our tree.
One possible extension (for way down the road): It’d be great to have a spot where family members can post rememberances, stories, and other anecdotes about other family members — essentially a collaborative family history. Maybe that’s already a feature here, and I just haven’t seen it.
Regardless, this looks great. Congratulations again on launching.
I started filling the data up but I got disappointed to know that I can’t find other relatives in the database, outside my own family tree. I thought I could link my tree to others who were previously unknown… it would be a form of getting to know lost relatives, and a much faster way to expand the family tree. Since it will probably stop growing when it gets to my great-grand parents, since they’re all dead, and don’t use the internet. Too bad.
KL: You can change the gender of a spouse by clicking the “edit info” link for that person when you are viewing your family tree. A dialog will display, allowing you to select the displayed gender. Thanks for trying Geni!
Maxim: Starting a family tree on Geni is simple: just go to http://www.geni.com/ and add yourself with the small form in the middle of the page. (The form is labeled “Start Here.”) Click the Add button to become the first member of your own tree, and then click the yellow arrows to add more family members.
Very nice interface. I’ve tried others but yours really flows. I like the fact that you try to allow for blended families, like my “Brady-Bunch” family with 3 kids from the father and 3 from the mother. I look forward to seeing your future developments.
Anonymous: We made sure to include half-brothers and half-siblings in the experience — the trick is to add all the parents first (click a right or left yellow arrow to add multiple spouses) and then click a down arrow to add the children. You’ll then see a menu of all available parent combinations to choose from.
If you added all the children to a single pair of parents, no problem. You can click the “edit info” link for each child, and on the dialog that appears, you’ll see a drop-down menu containing that same list of all parent combinations.
John: GEDCOM is in the works!
Jason: We have some great ideas for expanding the Geni experience to personal websites and other pages, but we want to be sure we address concerns about privacy first. We’ll be asking our beta users for guidance with features like that. Thanks for your comment.
rodgrigobarba: Currently, only those people that are in your family tree will be able to see your profile. Within your profile, you can choose whether to display various sections and items.
We know privacy is a concern for families, which is why family trees and profiles are only visible to those who belong to them. We’re looking forward to introducing new features to permit even more control over your information.
Laura: Thanks for trying Geni. One of the great things about creating a product like this is that we can test it out with our own data. Since many of us have “Brady Bunch” families, we spent extra time to make sure those family structures were easy to create and view.
Gian Carlo: The more relatives you enter, the better your chances that you’ll be connected sooner to the world family tree. For privacy reasons, we don’t currently allow you to search the entire Geni database, but we will notify you when you add somebody that already has a Geni family tree.
Looks great! Already loaded what I know and will have a few family members give it a try.
Something I’d suggest – Make a version for FRIEND groups!! I have “groups” of friends, some may know each other, some may not. You can connect them together, and use THAT as a great visual tool for your online network. You’ve already got fields for all their contact info (AIM, MySpace, YouTube).
This is a very well designed site. I was able to load my information relatively quickly. One feature I would recommend would be adding parents that aren’t necessarily a spouse, as this is an increasingly popular situation. Other than that I’m very impressed with the site.
WOW! Very friendly, I currently work with another tree software, but it does not allow interaction with family, as most family members like to peek and play but aren’t serious about genealogy. I will definitely be playing with this site.
A suggestion since it is in Beta, anyway to add a health feature to track family diseases. This has been one of my gripes about most software.
Otherwise, I can’t wait to add my tree, and watch it grow.
First of all, GREAT site. Hope it only gets better.
GEDCOM import would definately be a high priority.
Would also like to have the ability to add URL links to outside for work, school, or family.
Geni.us! Congrats from Me.dium. We love what you’ve done…
Just wishing David & team the best of luck with the new venture! As I have some family members deeply interested in our family genealogy, largely due to having a relatively unique name, I forwarded the information off to them today.
Guys,
Absolutely wonderful job!
You seem to “borrow from the best” web sites out there. I see some obvious nods to LinkedIn.
I predict that you will be wildly successful.
Are you looking for investors?
I have been adding people to my tree and invited most of them, but they never got the email.
Is it just delayed or will they ever get it?
I have truly enjoyed this site. I found myself just adding more and more family members … over 50 now. I’m curious to find out if two family trees will eventually be combined? I guess there’s only one way to find out. I better write some letters to the ancesters in Ireland.
Geni Launches new Socianet
I think LinkedIn is a very addicitive and playful implementation of professional social networking
And now Geni launches relation networking. I just started out and I think they have made an excellent job in implementing this, even my not-so-tech-savvy…
I am amazed! I am one of those family members that wants to preserve history and connections and this is exactly what I have been dreaming of. Your investors are going to make a killing. So on the import features, are you also going to support export in true “its your data” fashion?
Geni
Geni is a new Web 2.0 start-up company with a mission to build a complete family tree for humanity.
One particularly neat aspect of the site is that you can immediately start entering your information from the moment you arrive at the si…
Hi,
great stuff! but, ÆØÅ are shown in the profile, but not in the tree… 🙁
:morten
i like it! (and i don’t much like anything re: web 2.0) construction and data entry is easy. look forward to any other addl research tools that you might add. good stuff.
Hi all!
Great work! Just a little problem with accent for french people like me!
Jérémy
Geni-aaalll !
A tester de toute urgence : Geni !
Vous pouvez lire une présentation sur Tehcrunch et lire le billet douverture sur le blog de Geni.
Quest-ce que cest, un générateur darbre généalogique très sympa !
Côté développeme…
I love Geni! It is so easy to use that even my dad knows how to work with it 🙂
nice work
(is sending mail woking? i forgot my password)
What if I have parents, but they are not (and never have been) married? They are now listed as being married, but that’s not true.
Wishing you great success with Geni. Thanks for embracing the concept that we are all related – in time it should make for a more peaceful world.
Great site, always wanted to track my family genealogy tree. Will this site be in other languages like Russian, Latvian and so on ?. Noticed one problem, when I enter name in Cyrillic, it isn’t showing in my tree, just a blank rectangle.
David & the Geni Team,
THANKYOU!!!!
this is what i have been waiting for.
seriously.
i have been waiting about 4 years for THIS!.
it is brilliant, i am totally – TOTALLY – in love with Geni.com!
i will be telling everyone and anyone.
i’d love some real nice “PRINTING” options…
maybe even hook up with some really cool printers {like flickr does with moo and qoop}
so we can print out different funky designs of our own family tree….
anyway.
very excited.
oh and you need widget/badges for blogs/myspace etc!!
peace
djp72 – australia
Great site, a French colleague refered it to me after reading about it in TechCrunch. I personaly love all things relative to new visual interfaces and your site remembers me about http://www.cogmap.com/ which does a similar work for org charts. Org Charts and Genealogy Trees are so widely accepted and understood that it is difficult to use other visualization approaches to describe organizations and families. This may be one of the reasons why matrix organizations are hard to set in place or navigate … I will talk about your site in my blog on visual language http://www.uswim.net .
Congratulations for a job well done and good use of Ajax.
Another comment … as a great fan of mind maps I would have love a simple functionality to “close” branches of the tree for a better view.
Same comment as Shawn Scott: let’s face it, having a child together doesn’t necessarily make the two people husband and wife. I will have to refrain from sharing my tree with my family until I can add my “illegitimate” cousin in a proper way.
My cousin (female) married the cousin (male) of my spouse. Can geni.com build such a relation?
One last comment … your website doesn’t display accentuated letters (like in French) and I could not type arobases and dots, I had to copy/paste them (I use Firefox 1.5 on a PC)
I already predicted that you guys would come : http://www.cogmios.nl/google-genealogy-20060926.html
I have very high hopes for this website, In essense it is the most important web2.0 website out there (“what is more social than your family??”).
Obviously you will probably need a year or two to enhance the site, the missing GEDCOM import is a little bit dissapointing.
Also: the pulldown menu for the countries only shows current countries, when i e.g. go back to the 1500’s lots of these countries were different.
But in essence this is so cool that I think it has the power to become the most important site on the Internet. In time the biggest problem will become privacy and security. Some people will enter personal data while other relatives would not want to merge this data or show this data. This is a big problem.
I hope you can handle the expectations 🙂
The coolest thing would be that I would click on a random person on this earth, indepent of location, race or color and would see how we would be related in terms of “blood” since at the end everyone is related (see https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html)
even cooler it would be if I could automagically get a link in my weblog whenever i post about a person which then post to its profile page on genographic. ANY person.
I also hope your servers can pull the weight of the massive traffic that is coming your way.
Also: I just made a mistake I accidently “missed” a link in between my bloodline so i would want to couple it to a different grandfather unfortunately it only lets you link it to the direct forefathers… ah wel… lets delete the top part and start over again… (damn… why is there no gedcom import need to type it all over…)
greetings,
Edward de Leau
http://www.cogmios.nl
Geni is Live!
Geni is live! Like I posted hereunder, I really expect a lot of this website. It starts very intuitively, you just need to enter your name and it unfolds to allow you to let you enter your parents, then you find out you can e-mail your relatives to e…
Props to you guys for making this really cool web site, carry on with the good work and I hope you go far 😉
There doesn’t appear to be any way to indicate a marriage between two people who are already on the tree. For example, my Dad’s sister was married to my Mom’s brother, so I have “double-first” cousins (we share the same set of grandparents). I can add a spouse to my Mom’s brother or my Dad’s sister, but then I have a duplicate aunt or uncle.
Also – no one in my family has received any of the emails supposedly sent. I checked the server logs – nothing from geni.com.
Design Flaw:
Cant seem to add different mother to my first son who is not born of my current wife.
Cant add 1/2 sister without being prompted to select her parents as my dads current wife.
???
Wonders:
Opposed to having to “trick” as the comments stated adding all the parents first, can a feature be implemented to simply “add” a person to the list or tree and then select relationship from a drop-down?
STEP/MOTHER/FATHER/SISTER/BROTHER
SPOUSE…. so on.
I am the son creating this tree, so I am not sure I can add all the parents or spouses first as I added my Fathers name and his current wife… after that I can not add any more spouses to him.
That leaves my 1/2 siblings left out.
This is great and I want to use this, but not all families are 100% heterosexual. We should be able to same-sex spouses.
Great idea, as I’ve always needed my family to collaborate on the tree, and this would be a great way of filling out the branches.
GEDCOM import was mentioned above .. it’s very important, as is a GEDCOM export function.
Also .. not sure if you’re having first-week issues, but my experience of simply adding myself, mom, and dad, was very slow. Pages need to load much, much quicker.
Great idea. I’ll check back in a few weeks to see how it’s going!
Great site! It rocks. For some reason I can’t delete someone from my tree. The person’s box has an X on it. I click it, site refreshes, yet person remains. Help! My aunt was never divorced! When she sees it she’ll be mad.
Where do I input dates of birth?
Great! And it would be better if you also add Russian Language
Fantasic site. However, as far as I can tell – the email invites / verify email seems to be broken, as my wife and I have not gotten emails sent out. Is this a result of the digg effect?
When do you anticipate this being fixed?
Will the emails get sent, or do they need to be re-sent due to delivery failure?
Awesome site. I hope it supports the UK keyboard layout soon as I keep having to do SHIFT + 2 instead of SHIFT + ‘. Not being able to see the cursor in the box means I have to go back and delete half the address when I realise I’ve typed it wrong… again!
Other than that amazing site so far! I hated only being able to see direct relatives in other programs. I always want to see the whole thing.
The tool isn’t emailing temp passwords – once you’ve created your first tree you can’t log in again, because you’ve never gotten your password…
This is pretty neat. Running a tad slow right now. I have an aunt that was added as a spouse and an ex-spouse of my uncle and can’t delete the extra despite my best efforts, though I expect its just an easy bug. But I’m really excited about this. Looks great.
awesome, but SLOW. Don’t have time to wait…sorry.
Q: If two family members independently start trees, and then later find out about each others’ tree – is there a way to join them?
A really fantastic website you guys have got here. Can’t wait to see what’s coming down the line. My only gripe right now is the AJAX is rather slow compared to other web services, but I’m sure that’s equated to the surge in traffic for the first day. Anyways, great service. Keep it up!
You Guys Rock !!! your site is great and the concept is really cool,
For the next steps this will be cool to have the abilities to embed my Tree to display it in our blogs !!! like a youtube video, it will make a lot of visits to your site, and make our trees grow 😉
What about children of unmarried couples? Any way to show that my half-brother is the child of my father and his girlfriend, without indicating they are married?
top 20 requests:
1) Gedcom import and export
2) Gay marriages and not-marries relations
3) School system in profile is US based, cant be filled
in by people from other countries
4) deleting images does not update the screen
5) linking from anyone to anyone else in the tree (in case
of mistakes)
6) API to do lots of cool stuff
7) emailing temporary password takes a few hours
8) e-mail restriction on “dot” in e-mail address
9) other languages support: dutch, spanish, russian,…
10) printing reports
11) copy and paste works only after typing the first letter
12) no accents and special characters
13) country listbox should be freeform or ajax
14) marriage between people who are already in the tree
15) some people use the same e-mail address
16) more help on how to delete persons
17) explanation on the (future) merging of trees
18) travestites are not blue or pink… hahaha
19) option to add text to the e-mail being send to
relatives (e.g. translated text)
20) a forum to post this on!!
Due to unexpected and overwhelming response, Geni is currently down. We are busy adding more capacity to handle everyone’s family trees. Please stay tuned, and thanks for all your interest in Geni!
Jérémy, Morten, Stefan, Amaury de Buchet: We’re working on accents and expanded language support!
Armand and Josh: We will soon be adding more descriptors, so that non-spousal relationships will be reflected in the tree and in profiles. Thanks for your suggestions.
Brilliant! Sounds like the beginning of a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I can’t wait to see it gain a userbase, so that the information becomes even more valuable.
I’m new to the online genealogy game, but this interface is really simple. There is another comment here about importing existing genealogical data from other databases; that sounds like it would be a huge shot in the arm to building up Geni’s data — is that in the works?
Keep up the great work!
Painful and slow – Right now, I can’t see the tree and I can’t delete mistakes made by the system… Hoping the experience gets better.
Tried your site and it is a great concept. Ran into a few problems.
1) If make a mistake in a persons email addr, you can’t change it. This is also importnat since people change emai addresses.
2) I noticed that photos uploaded to an entry are sometimes truncated, sometimes at the top other times at the bottom.
3) After I added my last entry, I can no longer view any trees. It displays message at upper left “undefined’s tree 0 people”, abd also navigation info, but no tree
4) When I entered the last person, the add never completed, but I find that person in the “List” three tiomes. I need to delete the extraneous entries
5) window display times are extremely slow. It takes 2-3 minutes to save changes in the profile and another 2-3 minutes to display the next page.
6) Also found that when I enter the birth order for a person, you change the order to something else. The value varies depending on the other persons entered. For example, I entered my son born secons and indicated so. When I looked at it again, it said only child.
7) I have some people that use the sam email address. If I try to enter that address again it is rejected. This is a necessary evil. You can warn of the address already being in use , but shouls allow the user to accept it anyway.
I realize this is beta code, but I would like to point out an wrrors I see so you can make it better, Hope you don’t mind.
Hi !
Nice job !
[Ps : i’ve got a stupid bug : in the Flash embed, no way to type a @ (gave me a “à”) with my french AZERTY keyboard… i have to copy/past 😀
I like this a lot, especially because it should allow multiple members of my family to add people to our family tree. My sister’s more into this than I am, and my parents know more names & relationships than I do, so it should end up being pretty cool. Of course, it’ll get really exciting if our tree ends up merging with that of some more distant relative!
Problems I’m bumping into (besides major slowdowns):
1. Occasionally, when I add someone, it adds two of that person. Just a glitch, I’m sure, but it’s happened to me twice in about 18 people.
2. Is there any way to change the order of the marriages? I have an aunt whose first husband died and second marriage ended in divorce. I added them in that order, but the first husband has the red line, in spite of my having changed his status from “Current spouse” to “Former/late spouse.”
3. It’s inconsistent with recognizing people as dead. I add a spouse, uncheck the “Living” box… but they don’t get a dotted line. I check their personal info, and they’re marked as not living, but they’re still marked as “Current spouse.”
4. Why do lines between spouses sometimes connect from the sides of the boxes and other times from the bottoms of the boxes? It doesn’t have to do with children, because I have it both ways in families with kids. That visual inconsistency is just bugging me, because it looks like it’s denoting some sort of difference…
5. It would be really nice if there were a quicker way to change the birth order numbers, rather than having to go in and change the info on each individual person. Especially with how slowly the site is operating. In the meantime, how about if it just increases the birth order number by 1 for every sibling added? My Dad was listed as a 1, but all 3 sisters of his that I added were listed as 2’s. Either increment the number each time or just leave it blank, in my opinion.
Thanks again! I’m looking forward to seeing this develop! Especially if it speeds up…
I know the gay question has been addressed — just throwing my hat in the ring as well. Not having it really puts the brakes on a lot of relationships — including two mommies and two daddies, and significant others. Any idea when this will be added? I’m anxious to get started with my own family and also to blog about the site, but I’m waiting for that feature.
I am LDS and many people in my church do geneology. One of the things we keep track of are baptisms and other specific religious rites. Is there a way you can add a piece of software that would allow us to add events and corresponding dates?
I can’t seem to figure out how to do this. Once you add a person, if you forget to un-check the “Living” box, there is no way to edit their info to reflect that the person is actually deceased.
Otherwise, this is EXACTLY what I have been waiting for! Thank you!
I’ve been waiting months for someone to build this website!
In the future, is it possible to show a geographic overlay, like google analytics? My family is spread out all around the globe and it would be interesting to see how we’ve dispersed.
Also, I’m interested in the utility of this site for the study of genetics, linguistics, sociology, and ethnography. How long before users can analyze your data in this meta sense? I am interested in studying the diaspora of ethnic and cultural groups around the globe, viewed over time.
WOW! Never mind – I was totally missing the “Living” box on the main profile page.
I can’t wait to invite all my relatives and new in-laws!
this is an amazing software
Is there some forum or bugzilla to report bugs or suggest features ?
the comment names are wrong…
my above comment – from djp72 – is credited to Jevgenij –
and then i am credited for someone elses comment!
and pictures aren’t uploading…
you guys must be swamped!!!
It would be helpful if other schools (elementary, middle, high school, etc) could have a tab for “Add another”. Some people move around a lot during childhood!
Two items:
1) This is absolutely a killer app. Instant networks, incredibly viral, very USEFUL, and massive potential once huge trees begin to intersect. A great idea….one I genuinely wish I had thought of first.
2) The defaults when creating relationships are nice (filling in last names for children, etc). However, when creating a parent (or brother) for a married woman with a registered Maiden Name, the pre-populated last name should match that maiden name rather than the married name. Just a tip.
Create your family tree
Former COO of Paypal David Sacks has returned from a successful dabble in hollywood where he produced Thank You for Smoking) a Golden Globe Nominee. Sacks new venture is a family tree website called Geni – hardly a new concept since it has bee…
Congratulations,
You guys have done an awesome job. The UI is almost flawless and it is a beta version. You certainly have set the bar on usabilty. I wish you the best of luck.
Armand: If you have relatives with multiple marriages/partnerships, you can just keep clicking the right-hand or left-hand yellow arrows to add as many relationships as necessary. Once you have added those relationships, you can click on a downward-pointing yellow arrow to add a child. Each time you add a child, you’ll be presented with a menu to select that child’s parents — from all available couple combinations.
Thanks for trying Geni!
djp72: We’ve modified the comment style so that it’s clearer who said what. Thanks for the suggestion.
Great site overall! I’d like to add my vote for the top priority feature requests…
My family started adding to my tree as soon as I sent out invitations. They didn’t realize how many people I had already added (100+), and we now have a few duplicate entries. How soon will you have delete and combine features?
RE: Armand: If you have relatives with multiple marriages/partnerships, you can just keep clicking the right-hand or left-hand yellow arrows to add as many relationships as necessary. Once you have added those relationships, you can click on a downward-pointing yellow arrow to add a child. Each time you add a child, you’ll be presented with a menu to select that child’s parents — from all available couple combinations
—
I tried this but was not given the option to select the parents — it just dropped the new kid between her mom and the mom’s new husband. Also, how can we delete an entry? Now she’s got the wrong dad and I can’t figure out how to change it or delete her and start over.
Paul Horne: Did you click the downward arrow displayed on the person with the multiple marriages? If you clicked on the new husband (in this case), then his child would have only one possible mother (since he only has a relationship with one woman) and the new child would appear between that couple.
In any case should be able to delete that child from the tree, provided she doesn’t have a spouse or children of her own. Just look for the “X” icon in the upper right of her rectangle.
If you are still having problems, please click the Contact Us link and send us a message referring to your comments in this blog. Thanks!
For years I have wanted to start a family tree but have never found anything that suited my needs. I think the biggest and best feature of Geni is that other family members can have a hand in making the family tree grow.
I found this site via TechCrunch and I’m very excited about the possibilities. I know the site is still new but I’m sure that it will grow and become very popular. I for one have already started advertising this site to everyone I know.
Dear sir,
Indeed this a great work you have done. Enough of information has been loaded and this will help to locate others those who are part of the tree. Remarkable idea in the world of information tecnology.
Keep up Please,
M.K. Kalra
Please consider adding a field for date of marriage (to each spouse).
I would definitely buy a bunch of glossy poster of my entire tree if you made it available. I think it would make a great gift to send to every family in my tree.
I have a relative who is not married but has an adopted child. (Hence, there is no spouse.)
You might want to allow users to specify “no spouse” for a person, even if he/she has kids.
I think the distinction between “former/late spouse” and “current spouse” needs to be clarified somehow. Sad though it may be, every spouse will eventually be a late spouse, especially if you go back a couple of generations. However, doesn’t it seem strange to put a dotted line between great-grandparents who were married their whole lives?
To put it another way, my paternal grandfather died. My paternal grandmother is still alive. This is hardly an unusual circumstance. She has not remarried. Should I list him as my grandmother’s “current spouse” or “former/late spouse”?
My maternal grandfather and grandmother are both deceased. Should they list each other as “current spouse” or “former/late spouse”?
You see the confusion here? If I’m doing this properly, should every marriage between one or more deceased people have a dotted line?
Hi,
I was just putzing around on the site and noticed a few things.
My mom was in a relationship with a man that resulted in the birth of my half-sister but they were never married. Now after adding that half-sister I went into her profile and deleted all relationships that she and I do not share (dad, stepmom and half-sister) but she still being shown as my full sister.
Is there away to fix this?
Carl Jonard: We are working on finer levels of description for relationships, and you’ll see that in Geni very soon.
Janel Soffa: Without seeing your family tree, I can’t be sure I have the solution for you, but here’s what I think you’ll need to do: assuming that your half-sister’s father has been entered, you should be able to click your half-sister’s “Edit Info” link (when you are looking at your family tree). The dialog box that pops up should show you a menu control that allows you to choose from all possible combinations of parents. In that menu, you should see your own parents listed, as well as your mother and the father of your step-sister. Once you select the latter combination and save your changes, she should reappear as a half-sibling, rather than a full one.
To reiterate a few of the above suggestions:
1. Add the ability to have multiple grade schools, high schools, colleges, etc. and allow insertions into the sort order. Re-sort the listings by date.
2. Consider the same for jobs.
3. Occupation only shows once at the top of Jobs. Consider storing an occupation for each employer.
4. Add a “as of date” for current location that defaults to today.
5. Display the maiden names of the females or enclose the maiden name in parentheses.
6. Why show 12 inches on height– you should increment to the next higher foot.
7. Display a calculated age when you’ve entered the birthdate. Add this calculated age to other events (when you add them, like marriage). This would help catch entry errors, like a marriage date for someone 9 years old…
8. Add a marriage function that inserts the date/place into both partners of the union.
9. Set up some defaults for Country and possibly state when entering birth/death/marriage to speed the process.
10. Allow direct entry of numbers if you don’t click the pulldown– i.e. I’d like to put in a date of 26 directly, rather than having to mouse the pulldown or enter “2” seven times.
11. When you tab past the last entry field of a screen return to the top of the screen.
12. Adding parents to a married female should default to her maiden name.
13. I’m currently entering “events/facts” into the biography field. Could you add a separate place for these (graduation, awards, marriage, etc.) with a date field and perhaps an indication for a text note field (further description) and an indication that a source exists (with its separate description). A predefined list of common events/facts would be great with the ability to add your own to the scrolling list.
14. Allow date ranges (1912 – 1913) in case you’re not quite sure of a date but know the range.
I sure wish I had some of the above features before entering the plethora of information I’ve already done.
Keep up the good work!
Congratulations on this great site!
A feature I would like to see added is printing. I would like to print out the family tree and put it somewhere!
Thanks!
Just stumbled up on this site and it’s wonderful! I love that family members can collaborate to update information.
One idea I have: in addition to ‘tree’ or ‘list’ views, it would be great to have a ‘map’ view, which shows where your family originated from.
I was born in France of English, Reunion Island, and Indian ancestry, and my husband was born in the US of German ancestry. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to see our family paths charted on a map?
Thanks for the great tool!
I have someone who lost his wife and remarried and has now died and am having difficulty getting the tree to record this correctly. I haven’t been able to add his second wife and making the earlier deceased wife “former” doesn’t help.
Simplified visual representations of organisations : from 2D models to 3D models ?
I recently successively discovered 2 cool sites : first CogMap, an Ajax-based wiki to share org charts (eg Goggles), then Geni, an Ajax-based website to share family trees (source Techcrunch). Why am am writing about this here ? Have you noticed h…
I started using it yesterday and invited family to join in. Three generations of family members already up on it. Just the basic info of who their parents are/were. No personal details like cause of death. Finding relations I didn’t know I had.
The power of email and a site like this shows what can be achieved with one simple idea. Brought me in contact with family in continents I didn’t know I had. Just aswell I started now before the knowledgeable older generations head for the graves.
As a non-myspace/non-blogger person (way too personal) I find this idea brillant. First time I’ve throw myself into a website like this.
Wow, you might say that the technology is very good! Photo, so beautiful, very clear,u00a0 wish you good luck, create the future together! And I share my blogu00a0 http://www.shirts-sneakers.com/
[…] been to create the World Family Tree. In fact, if you read the blog post announcing the launch (http://www.geni.com/blog/geni_launches-36151.html), the mission is clearly stated in the very first sentence: “Hi and welcome to Geni, a new […]
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