

This project replaces the need to send out countless private messages to those users whom create duplicate profiles on a regular basis. Although it is written with predominantly the South African part of the big tree in mind, it would also be relevant for older profiles (before Anno 1600).
The cornerstone of GENI is the single tree of Everyone. Individuals that would like to create their own trees and private profiles are best advised to use MyHeritage, even by GENI itself. Creating your own tree on GENI is defeating the purpose, and extremely selfish, as no one "owns" any one grandfather or -mother.
Let's propose that you have worked on MyHeritage before and now want to copy your own tree onto GENI. Depending on the size of your tree, that can take a very long time to create profiles by hand (while GENI is not really that Gedcom friendly), and is in fact unnecessary. All you have to do, literally, is to find the same profiles on GENI, remembering to try possible alternative spellings, link to those profiles to see what is missing, and fill in the missing data downwards.
What you should definitely not do, is to start with your tree, from the top, and create profiles down to yourself and closest relatives.
A single tree will only work if there are no duplicate profiles and by not searching for the same profiles on GENI first, every profile you create is potentially a duplicate profile.
The problem with duplicate profiles can be summarised by the following bullets:
To summarise, creating your own profiles where such profiles already exist, is time wasted and potentially information lost by you as well by all others. And you are missing out on one of the best features of GENI, namely finding information which you may not have.
Let us illustrate some principles by way of an example or two.
1. Suppose you want to create a profile for Pierre Joubert who lived 1694 - 1730 in the Cape. From there you want to link to people living today (via relatives).
2. A more common scenario perhaps, is that you are searching for missing ancestors, and you make a breakthrough and find the names (and other information like birth dates, which is very helpful), and you now want to add the missing ancestors... STOP! Before adding, first do a search like the search in no 1 above, and see if they are not already on the tree. If not, add them, else (i.e. you found existing profiles), you should follow the following procedure:
3. A more complex matter is where you encounter duplicates (there are also duplicates remaining after most mergers).
Another powerful way to avoid unnecessary duplication, particularly in seeking connections to a known ancestor already on Geni, is to use the Descendant Graph from the HistoryLink tools (that latter link is to the Geni Project for more details). That can make it visually apparent where the current set of Geni profiles exist ... or don't exist ... on Geni (at least for Public profiles). There counterpoint to that Descendant Graph tool is the corresponding Ancestor Graph, which looks 'upward' from a particular profile.
With either graph, you can quickly bring up a profile of interest by holding the letter 'X' key when you click on that name in the circular graph.