Enhancements for Basic (Free) Users

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 and the “Managed by Me” tab on search results, but that wasn’t easy enough or intuitive enough, so we made some more adjustments.

When a close relative or a profile you manage appears in search results, you’ll now see a green checkmark next to it in the search results (see below). This means that you can click through to view that profile without upgrading.

We also want to reaffirm our commitment to giving users access to their data, whether on Geni or outside of Geni. Exporting a GEDCOM of your family tree has always been part of our free, basic account, and that has not changed. You can also access your data through partners such as AncestorSync, TreeSeek, and Charting Companion by Progeny.

Today, as a further sign of our commitment to open data, we’re announcing that Forest GEDCOM Export, which includes trees connected to yours, is now part of our free account. If you’re logged into your Geni account, you can export your forest here.

We hope that these changes help to address some of the issues that have been raised over the last week.

Please note that Forest GEDCOM Exports could take 24 hours or longer to process, because of the amount of data.