We'll Be Right Back

UPDATE: We're back, sorry about the downtime!

We're taking the site down temporarily for some maintenance. In the meantime, you can read about our newest features in our user forum.

Try Geni Pro free for 14 days!

14 day free trials of Geni Pro are now available to all users. Sign up for a trial to receive immediate, unlimited access to all of the benefits of Geni Pro including:

	Hot Matches Find matching profiles instantly while you browse your tree or profiles
	Collaborators Work with other Geni members to complete your tree and update profiles
	Tree Statistics Comprehensive statistics for your Family Group, Blood Relatives, and Ancestors
	Start your free trial now!

New Feature: Bookmarks

Use bookmarks to create shortcuts to your favorite profiles, photos, and more on Geni. You can bookmark any of the following:

• Profiles
• Photos
• Videos
• Posted Links
• Events
• Photo Albums

Click "Add Bookmark" at the top of any of these pages to bookmark the page:

Click the star icon to quickly access the last twenty items you bookmarked:

The View All Bookmarks link gives you access to all of your bookmarks. On this page you can remove bookmarks and view your bookmarks by category. Please note that all photos and videos that you previously marked as favorites are now bookmarks.

New Feature: Hot Matches List

With over 60 million profiles on Geni, there is a good chance that someone else's tree also contains a profile that is on your tree. Finding these duplicates helps you find new information about your relatives and meet others researching the same relatives. Who knows, you may even meet a new cousin!

The new Hot Matches list is the easiest way to find these duplicates. If we have found hot matches for any profiles in your Family Group, they will appear in this list. Use the view similar profiles link to view the matches. If you have not upgraded to a Pro account you can take advantage of our new 14 day free trial.

During the trial period you will have all the advantages of a Pro account, including:

• View all hot matches
• Faster merging
• Collaborate with other users
• Advanced Search

From the list of hot matches, you can either contact the manager of the potential duplicate or review the match and merge the profiles. This is the fastest, easiest way to grow your tree and meet new relatives.

View your Hot Matches list

Billing Issues

*Update:  As of 12:40 PM PST, it looks like our payments processor is back up and running. You should be able to purchase virtual gifts & subscriptions at this time, but please be aware that there may still be a few bumps in the road today.  We'll keep everyone updated here on our blog as things develop. 

Due to an issue with our payment processor, authorize.net, we have been unable to process any payments since late yesterday. We are waiting for more information and will keep this post updated. In the meantime, we are not able to process any virtual gift or subscription orders or renewals.

We'll Be Right Back After A Short Break

Update 7:00 PM Pacific: We're back.

We're taking Geni.com down for a few minutes for some maintenance. Total downtime should be less than ten minutes.

Scheduled Maintenance

Update 9:40 PM Pacific: Geni.com is back online.

We'll be taking Geni.com down for about 30 minutes tonight, starting at 9:00 PM Pacific. Updates will be posted here.

Merging & Collaboration Enhancements

We’ve released a number of enhancements today to make finding and merging profiles easier:

Confirm match from similar profiles

A few weeks ago we added the ability to merge profiles directly from the hot matches list. This option was only available when you managed or were collaborating with the manager of both profiles. Now you can merge directly from the hot matches list as long as you have edit permission on one of the similar profiles. If you only have permission to edit one profile, a request will be sent to the other manager to complete the merge.

Personal messages when requesting to collaborate

You can now add a personal message to collaboration requests. Use this message to explain why you are sending the request, what profiles or branches of your tree you have in common, or just to introduce yourself!

Hot matches in list views

Hot matches now appear in all list views. Underneath the name of any profile with matches you will see the number of similar profiles and a link to view them.

Merge Issues list

Your merge issues list now includes profiles managed by your collaborators. This will help you find additional merge issues that you can resolve. The most relevant merge issues will appear first in the list.

Share Your Tree

Inviting someone to be your friend on Geni has always been a great way to share your family tree, photos and news with someone who is not on your tree. Now we’ve added a new Friend Trees page under your Tree tab to give you quick access to all of your friends' trees.

Note that your friends can view your tree but can’t make changes like your family can. Standard tree privacy applies when friends view your tree, so by default they can’t view your living relative’s personal information. In the future we will remove the option to not share your tree with your friends. If you do not want your someone to be able to view your tree, you should not add them as your friend.

View your Friends' Trees

Introducing Shared Profiles

A shared profile is a profile where:

• Anyone can find and view the full profile
• The profile’s family and the manager’s family and collaborators can edit the profile 

With shared profiles you can make specific profiles more public while maintaining the privacy of the rest of the profiles you manage. You can share any profile you manage. We hope that you will share profiles that are historical, famous, or otherwise significant so that others interested in these profiles can collaborate with you.

Share profiles now

We'll Be Right Back

UPDATE: The site is back. You can visit Geni now

The site may be down for a few minutes while we perform some maintenance. We'll be back in just a few minutes.

Merging Hot Matches

With the recent enhancements to hot matches users are finding more and more duplicate profiles and potential tree merges. Now merging confirmed matches is as easy as finding them. Look for the new 'merge profiles' link in your hot match results. This link will give you a new side by side merge preview so you can confirm that both profiles are for the same person.

Unlike the 'move this person' feature in the tree, merging the profiles from this page will complete the merge. Once you merge the profiles there is no way to undo the merge. If you decline the merge the profile will be removed from the hot matches list. Right now you'll only see this link when you manage or collaborate on both profiles. Based on your feedback, we may use this new side by side merge preview in more places.

Search Enhancements

There are now over 15 million profiles connected on one Geni tree. As trees continue to grow and connect to each other, the distinction between users who are ‘connected’ and ‘not connected’ is becoming less important.

We’ve enhanced search to reflect this trend towards one tree that connects everyone. Geni users can now use search to find any profile on Geni whether or not they are connected yet. This will help you find relatives that are already on Geni and connect your trees.

The new search results tabs are All of Geni, Connected to You, and Managed by You. By default, users in our largest tree will search All of Geni and everyone else will search Connected profiles.

One of the benefits of this is that you can view all hot matches in one list without switching between two tabs.

Keep in mind:

• Minors are still never searchable
• This does not affect whether or not profiles are publicly searchable
• This does not affect what a user can see if they use search to find your profile

Improved Hot Matches!

Hot matches are the quickest way to grow your family tree. Use hot matches to:

* Compare your tree to over 50 million profiles to find duplicates
* Save time adding new branches to your family tree
* Connect with other users that share common relatives

We recently added immediate family name matching to increase the relevance of hot matches. Matches are now based on first name, last name, maiden name, birth year, death year, gender, living/deceased, and immediate family names to provide the most accurate matches possible.

View hot matches now

Advanced Search Enhancements: Soundex, Metaphone & More

We've added options to the Advanced Search interface to help you find profiles that previous searches may have overlooked.

The first option lets you search names using soundex or metaphone to find profiles with alternate spellings. Each uses a different matching technology, so you can try the same search with each to see what works best for your particular search terms.

Next is the Match blank years option. When you enter a year search term, such as year of birth, your results will only include profiles that have a matching year. Check the Match blank years box to also include profiles that don't have a year entered. Similar profiles matches uses the match on blank years option to find all potential matches.

Similar profiles now search on maiden name and last name. You'll notice an OR search term in the last name field of these similar profile searches. You can use OR in any name field except for All Names to expand your search.

We hope these enhancements make it easier than ever to find missing branches and duplicates profiles on your tree. Let us know what you think.