Geni - Connecting Families All Over the World

The following testimonial was written by April, an avid Geni user. April wanted to share her experience she has had with Geni, to let other people know what they can look forward to experiencing as they start to build their Geni family tree with the rest of their family.

In February 2007 I learned about Geni.com, which is when I started building my family tree.  Since then, with the help of my cousins, we have built a tree that today contains nearly 12,400 living and deceased profiles.

The collaborative aspect that Geni offers is extremely important to our family due to our current locations that separate us geographically. We live all over North and South America, within several European countries, as well as Israel, South Africa, Australia and Zealand. Participants communicate in English, French, Germany, Hebrew and in the near future Spanish.

Most interesting, I did not know most of these cousins when I started. I started with what I knew, childhood memories, a few family documents, and one relative, an uncle in his mid-90's as a source of information. From there we began to invite family members to participate. They then invited more family members to participate. This process has been repeating itself for the past year and a half and what we are left with is a robust amount of family history that can be preserved and passed down to future generations.

As a family we are constantly pushing Geni to develop new ways to help our Tree grow further and allow access to all cousins, no matter where they fall in the Tree.  This is important because cousins, particularly in Europe, married distantly related cousins.  So in addition to being a large family we are "tangled up."  With the help of Geni's 'cycle feature,' and sometimes their customer support, we have been able to display these intermarriages in an easy to understand manner.   

Also, at one time or another we have used all of the Geni.com features. Typically, Geni programmers are quick to help us with programming problems (man and computer created), if need be. However, just today my second cousin in Israel told me how much easier Geni.com is to use over another on line system he has tried to use.  He was also impressed in the linking across the tree marriage lines that Geni's Tree Merging feature enabled me to do last weekend. We believe that Geni's easy to use interface is what has enabled us to involve our extended family and thus extensively grow our family tree.

Just recently, I have found other family members, new to me, that have started their own Geni tree. In most cases we have combined our efforts.  However, a couple still need to be merged through the Geni Tree Merging feature.  Also, other cousins are preparing to add large Gedcom files to our extended tree.

With Geni, cousins who are actively working on their family trees have found family members known to other cousins but not previously know to them. One newly discovered cousin told me yesterday, "as we grow and bring in other family groups, relationships previously just hinted at, become understood and can be built out for everyone to see forever and ever." 

If anyone other Geni members would like to share their positive experience while using Geni, please send them to community@geni.com