{"id":6156,"date":"2014-01-31T23:59:50","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T23:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/?p=6156"},"modified":"2016-01-27T00:02:06","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T00:02:06","slug":"are-you-my-cousin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/press\/are-you-my-cousin\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You My Cousin?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The New York Times, January 31, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n<p>By A.J. Jacobs<\/p>\n<p>I LOVE my family, but I\u2019m glad I don\u2019t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I\u2019d be bankrupt within a week.<\/p>\n<p>My family tree sprawls far and wide. It\u2019s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren\u2019t, you probably will be soon. It\u2019s not really my tree. It\u2019s our tree.<\/p>\n<p>The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands \u2014 or millions \u2014 of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate. One site, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geni.com\/\">Geni<\/a>, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/02\/01\/opinion\/sunday\/are-you-my-cousin.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times, January 31, 2014 By A.J. Jacobs I LOVE my family, but I\u2019m glad I don\u2019t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I\u2019d be bankrupt within a week. My family tree sprawls far and wide. It\u2019s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count,&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/press\/are-you-my-cousin\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Are You My Cousin? | About Geni<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/press\/are-you-my-cousin\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"geni\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/press\/are-you-my-cousin\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.geni.com\/corp\/press\/are-you-my-cousin\/\",\"name\":\"Are You My Cousin? 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