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Geni.com

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Geni
Type of businessPrivately held company
FoundedJune 2006; 18 years ago (2006-06)
HeadquartersLos Angeles, California, U.S.
Founder(s)David O. Sacks
Alan Braverman
Amos Elliston
PresidentGilad Japhet
General managerMichael Stangel (USA)
IndustryGenealogy, Social networking services
ParentMyHeritage
URLwww.geni.com Edit this at Wikidata

Geni is an American commercial genealogy and social networking website, founded in 2006,[1] and owned by MyHeritage,[2][3] an Israeli private company, since November 2012.[4] As of 2024, MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website, though you can still match Geni profiles to trees on MyHeritage and to other family tree sites and digitized records.[5]

The New York Times groups it with FamilyLink.com and Ancestry.com, "a vast and growing trove of digitized records".[6] As of September 16, 2024, around 192,774,380 profiles had been created on Geni.[7]

Features

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Geni.com website

At the website users enter names and email addresses of their parents, siblings, and other relatives, as well as profiles with various fields of biographical information about themselves and their relatives. From there users may graphically manipulate sections of their connections network to create a complete personal family tree.[8]

The service uses the contact information to invite additional members to join, and builds a social network database from the information collectively entered by members. For now users may only see information belonging to themselves, their connected "family group", and to people in their immediate network who have given them permission.[9]

Discussion forums and projects

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Each family tree features a family discussion forum where messages can be posted and responses made. It can be used as such a digest for family news. There are also public discussions, profile specific discussions, and project discussions.

Projects are special interest groups organized around historical topics (e.g. "World War One - Casualties"), immigration patterns (e.g. "Norwegian American"), occupations (e.g. "Librarians"), place-names (e.g. "Christ Church, Oxford University"), or any other subject of general interest that will foster social discussion among members, as well as providing a portal to which biographical profiles may be linked.

Importing and exporting

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From 2008[10] until December 2010, Geni had a built-in feature that allowed users to import their family history using the GEDCOM file format. This facility was disabled for eight years because Geni found it was duplicating thousands of existing profiles, often with poor information quality as compared to the existing profiles.

In February 2019 a new GEDCOM file import feature became available that allows the import of profiles which didn’t exist before on Geni. Only a few generations of a tree are imported at a time, continuing only on branches where there are no matches to existing profiles on Geni.[11]

Data from public records and family trees can also be imported from 13 supported web sites using an independently developed semi-automatic tool called SmartCopy, which is based on web scraping. Families are imported one at a time; the user can manually edit or verify the information before importing, and also choose between adding the information to existing profiles or creating new profiles. SmartCopy includes a consistency check feature that warns when data may be unreasonable. The user must ask for full access to the tool. SmartCopy is a third-party open source web browser extension that has been available since 2015.[12]

DNA information

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Lists can be compiled of profiles that are expected to have the same haplogroup as a specific profile, since they are related on a strict male line or female line.

Genealogical DNA test results (autosomal tests, YDNA tests and MtDNA tests) can be imported from various test sites. The haplogroup of the test person is indicated and propagated in the family tree to all profiles that are expected to share it. Lists of tested people matching the DNA are presented.

Automated consistency checking

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A serious problem with online family trees is the inappropriate propagation of information from one ancestor or family line to another. This can happen if users make incorrect identifications between ancestors and others in the tree already. This can lead to strange results such as people born after their mothers have died or when their supposed parents were still small children. In 2019 Geni introduced automated consistency checking which alerts users to 28 types of such problems.[13]

Reception

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By 2008, Geni was the chief website operating on the "one great family" collaborative model (now commonly known as "collaborative genealogy"), seen as the next step for genealogy in the digital era.[14][15] Geni's model has been described as a new collaborative, resource-sharing alternative to the "corporate for-profit model" of genealogy research.[16]

Scientists and academics have used Geni for genetic, anthropological, and sociological research. Due to its size and geographic spread, Geni has been cited as a "key social media website" by researchers.[17] Educators have used Geni's visual and social media attributes as a way to get students interested in family history.[18] Author A. J. Jacobs used Geni extensively for his 2017 book It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree and partnered with the company to host his 2015 "Global Family Reunion."[19]

In 2017, a multinational team of scientists led by Yaniv Erlich used 86 million publicly available profiles from Geni, of which 13 million were connected into a single family tree, to study the structure of historical populations over the past 600 years, mostly from Western Europe and the United States.[20][21][22][23] Their findings, published in Science, were used to analyze the genetics of longevity and familial dispersion.[24]

Much like Wikipedia and other wikis, Geni was criticized in early years over users not citing sources, leading the site's staff and power users to push the community to use more documentation.[25][26][27] As Geni profiles and projects have become more documented, Geni has been cited in academic journals, though some critics remain concerned about the accuracy of collaborative trees as a whole.[15][20][28][29]

References

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  1. ^ launched January 2007 David Sarno (August 5, 2007). "Fertilizing the family tree on Geni.com". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July 18, 2022.
  2. ^ Arrington, Michael (January 12, 2007). "PayPal, Pulp Fiction and Geni". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  3. ^ "Geni.com launches venture backed family tree site". SocalTech.com. January 16, 2007. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  4. ^ "Geni is Joining the MyHeritage Family". Geni (Press release). November 28, 2012.
  5. ^ "What are Smart Matches™?". Retrieved December 24, 2021.
  6. ^ Mickey Meece (May 18, 2011). "Finding Family History Online". The New York Times.
  7. ^ "Geni's World Family Tree". Retrieved December 24, 2021.
  8. ^ Marshall, Matt (January 16, 2007). "Geni aims to build family tree for whole world". Venture Beat. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  9. ^ Butler, Phil (January 17, 2007). "Geni - Links in A Bottle". profy.com. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  10. ^ Eastman, Dick (May 12, 2008). "Geni Adds GEDCOM Import". Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter. Archived from the original on May 13, 2008. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
  11. ^ "The Return of GEDCOM Imports on Geni". Geni.com blog. February 22, 2019.
  12. ^ SmartCopy, Geni project, access date 2018-01-13
  13. ^ "Introducing the Consistency Checker to the World Family Tree". November 8, 2019.
  14. ^ Bybee, Howard C. (2008). "Online Genealogical Research Resources". Brigham Young University Studies. 47 (1): 153–164. JSTOR 43044620.
  15. ^ a b Pickholtz, Isaac (February 28, 2015). "Opinion: Concerns About 'Collaborative Genealogy' Websites". Avotaynu Online. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  16. ^ Wilson, Pam (December 2012). "An uneasy truce: brokering collaborative knowledge building and commodity culture". International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Soft Data Paradigms. 3 (3/4): 204–239. doi:10.1504/IJKESDP.2012.050721. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  17. ^ Edwards, Denny (April 2010). "NDTA and Social Media". Defense Transportation Journal. 66 (2): 147. JSTOR 44123268.
  18. ^ Rankins-Robertson, Sherry; Cahill, Lisa; Roen, Duane; Glau, Gregory R. (Spring 2010). "Expanding Definitions of Academic Writing: Family History Writing in the Basic Writing Classroom and Beyond". Journal of Basic Writing. 29 (1): 56–77. doi:10.37514/JBW-J.2010.29.1.04. JSTOR 43443890.
  19. ^ Williams, Alex (May 8, 2015). "A.J. Jacobs and the World's Largest Family Reunion". The New York Times. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  20. ^ a b Kaplanis, Joanna; Gordon, Assaf; Wahl, Mary; Gershovits, Michael; Markus, Barak; Sheikh, Mona; Gymrek, Melissa; Bhatia, Gaurav; MacArthur, Daniel G. (February 7, 2017). "Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees using millions of relatives". bioRxiv 10.1101/106427.
  21. ^ Zhang, Sarah (February 17, 2017). "What Can You Do With the World's Largest Family Tree?". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  22. ^ Kaplanis, Joanna; Gordon, Assaf; Shor, Tal; Weissbrod, Omer; Geiger, Dan; Wahl, Mary; Gershovits, Michael; Markus, Barak; Sheikh, Mona; Gymrek, Melissa; Bhatia, Gaurav; MacArthur, Daniel G.; Price, Alkes L.; Erlich, Yaniv (2018). "Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives". Science. 360 (6385): 171–175. Bibcode:2018Sci...360..171K. doi:10.1126/science.aam9309. PMC 6593158. PMID 29496957.
  23. ^ Collins, Francis (March 13, 2018). "Crowdsourcing 600 Years of Human History". Retrieved October 17, 2022.
  24. ^ Hotz, Robert Lee (March 2, 2018). "The 13 Million People in Your Family Tree". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 17, 2022.
  25. ^ "Geni Podcast: Citing Your Sources". Geni Blog. April 7, 2011. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  26. ^ "Geni Tips: How to Add Documents to a Profile". Geni Blog. May 21, 2015. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  27. ^ "Geni Tips: How to Add Sources to Profiles". Geni Blog. June 30, 2015. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  28. ^ Jorgensen, Danny L. (Spring 2015). "Mormontown: Collective Memories of a Cutlerite Colony in Iowa". The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. 35 (1): 163–183. JSTOR 26317097.
  29. ^ Richards, Bernard (2015). "William Fox Talbot and Thomas Carlyle: Connections". Carlyle Studies Annual. 35 (1): 85–108. JSTOR 26594487.
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