Merges

Shalom Roberta,
I am NOT one of those asking you to merge with me. I'm just a Geni Curator, who noticed this Public Discussion you started. So while I understand your point of view there IS a problem.

Looking at the "Activity" tab of your profile, I can see that it shows your many connections to various notable people, kings, queens and Hollywood stars. This means that you are thoroughly connected to the shared parts of Geni's historical tree. As such, amongst the 1700+ profiles that you added to Geni, you too probably have many duplicates of these and other historical profiles, and the intervening generations.

It is most likely these profiles that people want to merge, to both remove duplicates and clear-up the tree, making it more usable, and to achieve Geni stated goal of having a single public profile for historical figures. If you are worried about the QUALITY of the data in the profiles of these historical figures, then Geni has recently created the Curators group ( http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000009728208335 ), to do just that - make the historical tree much cleaner and ensure the quality of the data there, by enabling us to designate profiles as "Master copies" and lock this information to protect it.

Additionally, if people are asking to merge more recent and less notable profiles, then these too are probably duplicates of people in your family tree. You will probably GAIN information and connections from merging these profiles. By doing so you gain access to the work invested by many other people. Geni is truly a Collaborative effort, and we ALL gain from working together instead of duplicating our efforts.

I also see that you were added to the Tree by Corey MARENTETTE, whatever her connection to you is. So you gained from her efforts. She has 19 Collaborators, i.e. a not-small number of people interested and working on her tree. This tree is also yours. So you having added a large number of profiles to it, they probably have some level of justified interest in those as well.

I hope this explanation makes the "big-picture" and the reasoning behind these requests clearer to you. Feel free to ask me any additional questions you might have, here or by message.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam,
Geni Curator

Roberta - your tree is already a part of this Big Tree with some 45 million profiles, so your Public Profiles (older ancestors) WILL be merged if there are duplicates. A Geni tree is a collaborative tree, and thus no single user "owns" parts of it when there are shared ancestors.

See
http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Big_Tree
http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Curators

Hi Schuel, I am glad you sent me the email. After reading it I decided to write to one of the curators who is related to me & said I would let her merge with with some of the people in my tree. Corey Marentette is my 3rd cousin once removed.We have been corresponding on & off since the 1980's...but have never met. I was quite shocked to see so many kings & queens & other royalty & famous people that I am related to. Before I just though I was 3/4 French Canadian & 1/4 Irish....now maybe I am a bit of a Heinz 57...lol

Roberta,

Through collaborating I have learned all kinds of things about my family history -- that my father, who was relatively well informed, never even knew. Just discovered English CATHOLICS in my family.

We really are all connected.

We really are connected or related. I have discovered that there are people who are alive or deceased from many many places in the world that are related to me.