The Geni Blog

Geni's approach to social networking

"...Geni.com is interesting because it's a site that organizes your family tree. That's a value-add that other social networks don't provide..."

Bambi Francisco's Blog

New: you can delete email addresses

Many of you have asked for the ability to delete email addresses from your own account or from other profiles in your tree.

We have made it easier to do this. Just click "edit info".

You can delete any of your own email addresses, provided it is not the last email on your account. We will introduce a "delete my account" feature soon to handle this case.

If you are trying to delete someone else's email address, you can do this as long as they have not already accepted the invitation to join.

If they have not accepted the invitation and you delete their email address, their invitation will be cancelled.

Email addresses which have been deleted can be re-used, and a new invitation will be sent. (The recipient must use this invitation and not the old one to join.)

We are continuing to work on additional error-correction mechanisms.

New: "partners" and "ex-partners"

Many of you requested the ability to label a significant other as a "partner" (or "ex-partner") as opposed to only a "husband or "wife" (or "ex-husband" / "ex-wife").

You can now do this by clicking "edit info". Look for the field label called "Partner" and use the pull-down menu to change how your partner is described. Your choices are now: 1) Current spouse; 2) Current partner; 3) Former/late spouse; 4) Ex-spouse (divorced); and 5) Ex-partner.

Brief Downtime

This morning Geni experienced a brief outage related to one of the fixes we released last night. If you were able to view your family tree earlier this morning, you may have noticed missing relatives or branches of your tree. We are currently updating Geni with a new version of our relationship engine, which should restore any missing portions of your family tree. Please note that no information has been lost, and Geni should be back online within the hour.

Thanks again for actively participating in our beta, and stay tuned for updated functionality regarding expanded relationship types and family structures, more flexible deleting rules, and internationalization.

UPDATE: We are back online as of about 1:00 PM PST. Please let us know if you see any irregularities in your family tree, via the Contact Us form -- in particular, if you attempted to add back missing relatives to your family tree, and are now seeing duplicates.

UPDATE 2: If you are still seeing the maintenance plumber, try holding down the CONTROL key (sometimes labeled "Ctrl") on your keyboard while clicking your browser's Reload button. 

Users Helping Each Other

Thank you again for the incredible response to Geni. As you might expect, we are currently experiencing very high volumes of customer emails.

As a result, we have asked users with product suggestions to make them here, on the Geni blog. This will let other users see and comment on them, thereby letting the most popular suggestions rise to the top. We read every suggestion posted here, so your ideas will get just as much attention as if you emailed them to us.

In addition, we are asking users with general questions about the product to post them here where other users can reply and help them. You can just comment to this post with your questions. We appreciate all the users who help us answer questions.

If you have a problem specific to your account, please do not hesitate to contact us through the email forms provided in the footer of the site. We will strive to address every user's issues as quickly as possible. Thank you!

Tree Merging and Gedcom Importing

Many users have requested the ability to merge trees and import a Gedcom file. It is our intention to offer both these features. However, our timeframe is 2-3 months. Why so long? Tree merging requires us to give you the tools necessary to resolve conflicts and eliminate redundancies in trees; also greater privacy controls will accompany large trees.

Gedcom imports will follow afterwards as a special case of tree merging, where we give you the ability to merge a Gedcom tree with your existing Geni tree.

In the meantime, what should family members do when they have started multiple trees? You can work separately, expecting to unite the trees down the road. Or you can decide to work on just one tree for now, joining the other tree with a different email address.

Please know that we are working as fast as we can to keep up with growing traffic, fix the issues you've identified with the site, and layer on new and exciting features.

Same-Sex Marriages, Unmarried Partners, and Diverse Family Structures

A number of users have inquired whether Geni supports same-sex marriages, unmarried partners, or families which bring together children from previous relationships.

1. Geni trees do support same-sex marriages. When spouses are added, their default sex is the opposite of their partner. But this default can be changed by clicking "edit info". We are working on a simpler way to add a same-sex marriage.

2. While unmarried partners can be added to the tree, they do not have their own label as of now. We will introduce the "partner" designation shortly.

3. Geni trees do support families that include children from previous relationships. To add a half-sibling or step-sibling, we recommend that first you add all the parents, then add the siblings. Geni will prompt you to choose the parents for each sibling. If you added the sibling before the parents (so Geni assumed it was a full sibling), you can make the correction by clicking "edit info".

In summary, our goal is to make Geni flexible enough to accomodate many different kinds of families. We are working to implement your feedback as soon as we can.

Lifehacker: Build Your Family Tree With Geni

“Geni's smooth interface and social features make it by far the best genealogy app we've seen.”

Lifehacker Blog

If You Make a Mistake in Your Family Tree

Per your requests, we've made it easier to remove people from your family tree. This happens just like always: just click the little "x" symbol in the top right corner of the person you'd like to remove. However, since we've expanded the rules that determine who can be removed, you'll be asked to confirm this action. Removals cannot be undone, so be sure you really want to remove the person in question!

Because building a family tree is a collaborative process, there are some cases where you will not be able to remove a person:

1. That person has joined Geni and "claimed" their profile
2. That person has already been invited to join
3. That person has other relatives attached to him or her, who would otherwise be disconnected from the tree.

That third situation can be handled by first deleting the attached relatives, which will then make your target person removable.

Remember that you do not have to remove a person to make a correction to his or her information or location. You can click "edit info" to display a dialog that allows you to change things like the person's name or gender. By selecting an alternate set of parents on that same dialog, you can also change a person's location in your family tree.

UPDATE: A number of users have reported that they cannot delete some people in their trees who, according to the rules above, should be deletable. We have identified the problem and are working to fix this issue. Also, we are working to make people deletable even if they have been invited to the tree. Finally, we are working to let users delete any email address. So please standby -- you will be able to fix your trees soon! 

Are you getting our emails?

As part of our recent upgrades to make the site faster, we've also improved the speed of our outgoing emails, which you should receive within a minute (at most) of the action triggering them.

Here's what we'd like to know: are any of our emails getting blocked by your email's spam filter? If so, please comment on this post, and be sure to tell us who your email provider/ISP is.

Likewise, if you know of a relative who did not get your invitation to join the tree because it got blocked by their spam filter, please let us know that too, along with their email provider.

We will work to resolve this issue. Thank you for your help!