The Geni Blog

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thursday, our users in the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving by gathering their families together for dinner and giving thanks. Thanksgiving is traditionally a time to visit family and share memories and family stories. If you have the opportunity to spend time with your family, especially those that you don't see as often, don't forget to invite them to add what they know about your family history on Geni. Often times these families gatherings bring out memories and stories that you may not hear otherwise.

And while your at it, why not prepare your family by sending them some gifts from our new selection of Thanksgiving gifts? I definitely recommend the pie!

Send your family a gift

The Open Web Awards are coming...

Nominations for the second annual Open Web Awards are now being accepted:

Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories. This year, we’re partnering with over 100 blog partners, Poll Daddy for extra security and ease of voting and extending the nominations period and voting rounds for greater participation.

Nominations will be held from November 5th till November 16th 2008. The first and final voting rounds will be held from November 19th till December 15th.

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

What are People Tweeting About Geni?

Geni has recently started using Twitter, a microblogging service, to keep current and potential Geni users up to date with the latest Geni news. In return, Twitter users are able to relay feedback to the Geni Team and other Twitter users. We have found that this communication tool has helped improve our relationship with Geni users who are also on Twitter. One recent and very positive Tweet (what updates on Twitter are called), was from Jason Calacanis,a successful and well known internet entrepreneur.

Here is what he had to say:

JasonCalacanis: my family is going www.GENI.com crazy.15 of them r uploading all kinds of photos+filling out trees. 1 of 10 best product in past five years 

and

JasonCalacanis: My family is going crazy playing with www.Geni.com and it's just such an amazing product. Timelines, photos and family tree are just amazing

We really appreciate Jason mentioning Geni and we are pleased to hear that he considers Geni 1 of the 10 best products in the past 5 years. More importantly, we are excited to hear that his family is enjoying the Geni product!

Here are some other recent tweets about Geni:

PaulDuxbury: @geni www.geni.com just keeps getting better - highly recommended product!

MurphyC: geni.com is addicting

phingers: I have to say I agree. www.geni.com is incredible, easy to use, intuitive, a true genius in web 2.0

macdup: @JasonCalacanis thanks for this link. My family is going crazy too. This is an awesome site. http://www.geni.com/

joegarraffo: Last plug for geni.com (I swear), but this site rocks. I'm really happy my kids will have this. Maybe as an upsell they'll print and sell it

rosenkrieger: @JasonCalacanis thanks for the tip about geni.com I just started - its awesome!

acton: exploring Geni.com with my Dad and learning all about my Bohemian Great Grand Parents. Fascinating stuff

briancaldwell: Observation: only 2 of my family members use Facebook, but 11 others use Geni.com as a social network.

aidanmann: Writing to a cousin in the US who has added all the Maori side of the family in New Zealand to our geni.com family tree, it's massive.

to_morrow: I've started building my family tree, its looking awesome. I'm using http://www.geni.com

dblogged: wow, geni is an awesome website. http://www.geni.com/home

jamesgoux: Been working on my family tree this week on geni.com. I've even got third cousins once removed on there.

addingvalue: Just spent an hour with my mom discussing social networking, and used geni.com as example. Worked a treat. She's hooked.

makenai: Setting up a family tree on Geni.com - wife and I are racing with our respective sides.

mdoeff: It's so cool to watch my family tree on Geni.com on growing virally. What an amazing service.

itafroma: Playing with Geni (http://geni.com): makes me want to invest some time and research into filling it out.

pschena: People, if you're not on geni.com yet, get on it now! You can thank me in 25 years time.

mani_monaj: Geni.com is one of the most amazing online website available ;)

Deodra: geni.com is flippin incredible. I LOVE it. They just added my dream feature to their site- import GEDCOM. Now, my genealogy life is complete

Once again, thank you everyone who posts about Geni and provides the feedback that we need to continuously improve our product. If you would like to read more Tweets about Geni you can do so here. Also, if you would like to follow the Geni Updates posted to Twitter you can do so here.

Join the Geni Party in Chicago

Looks like we will be hosting a get-together with users in Chicago. We are working on a Meet Up outside of the show so that those who can make it to Chicago but will not be attending the show can join the Geni team. Please send your RSVP to community@geni.com so that we can plan on how much food to order. Also please include your t-shirt size and telephone number so that we can reconfirm your attendance.   

Meet the Geni Team in Chicago

The 28th Annual International  Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies , Chicago

                                             

August 17-22, 2008           Meet Adam, Alan, Ilya and JoAnne at IAJGS

You can register here.    We will not be at the conference the entire time but we will be there from Sunday, Aug 17th through Tuesday, Aug 18th so if you are in the area please stop by the exhibit hall to say hi. Note the exhibit hall is open until 8pm on the 19th. While we're there we will be demonstrating the Geni site along and give you a look at some new features.

If you are interested in getting together with other Geni users that will be attending please send an email to community@geni.com -- if we have enough responses we'll plan a small get together over coffee, tea, bagels, donuts or something similar.         

      

Happy 4th of July

Happy Independence Day to our users in the United States. Many of you will spend time with your families this weekend. Make sure you take lots of pictures! And don't forget that you will be able to upload Videos to Geni very soon - this weekend may be a great opportunity to take video of visiting family and interview your ancestors.

How did you first hear about Geni?

We love to get to know our users better by asking you questions. Let us know how you first heard about Geni by answering the poll question below:

How Many Languages Does Your Tree Speak?

As Geni continues to grow, family trees also grow to span country borders. Does yours include speakers of different languages? Take this poll and tell us just how many different languages are spoken within your family tree.

Geni Helps New Mom Share Her Joy with Entire Family

As Geni continues to add new features to help our users stay in touch with their family, new parents in particular are finding Geni to be a convenient, efficient, and fun way of sharing their baby updates. Kristina Endraske, a 27 year-old first time mom, gave birth to Kaleb Dean Endraske on April 5, 2008. Kristina explains below how Geni helps her to share her experience with her loved ones even with her busy schedule.

                                                                      

If you are a new parent and you have not visited Geni.com, you are definitely missing out. The site is a must for new moms and dads. My husband and I welcomed our first child into this world two months ago and ever since then I have been amazed at how fast 24 hours can go by. I desperately wanted to share this new season in my life with everyone whom I love but unfortunately, physical distance and the lack of time and energy were my largest culprits. Geni.com is my perfect solution.

Geni has numerous attractive features that are conducive to my new “mommyhood”. Because I have somewhat of a large extended family, it is virtually impossible to talk to each relative on a daily or even weekly basis. Moreover, some family members physically live too far, which has added to the difficulty of staying in contact with them. The features Geni offers have allowed me to share baby Kaleb news on a daily basis with all family members without having to make 30 plus phone calls or driving across the country. When you haven’t had a full nights rest in months, these features are a life saver. My new found friend is “efficiency” and that is exactly what these features offer. My personal favorite is the Latest News feature because it seems to be an appropriate place to put brief updates (i.e. Kaleb’s first smile, his current weight/height, etc.). The best part is that contrary to e-mailing, you do not have to physically designate each recipient every time that you send a message. Instead, your “Latest News” is posted on each relative’s Home page under their “Family News.” How brilliant!

I have to say that Geni won my heart with its “user friendly” feature to upload pictures. Lets just say that I am a picture-taking queen that is not mechanically savvy. O.K., that was too nice! I am obsessive with taking pictures and I am lucky if I can even figure out how to take the memory card out of the camera to have the opportunity to upload the pictures. Geni has made the uploading process simple and quick, which has allowed me to share pictures of Kaleb within minutes of taking them. I am a proud mommy and I am thankful for the unlimited space that Geni has designated for pictures. In the first two weeks after Kaleb was born, I think that my husband and I had taken close to 1,000 pictures… yes we are first time parents! The ability to create albums and personalize each picture has helped me to keep the pictures organized and truly made it special for loved ones to have insight into this journey with our precious son.

From posting daily news to uploading priceless Kodak moments, Geni has been a “vehicle” for me to share the joy of my son with my loved ones, near and far, young and old. What is amazing is that I haven’t had to sacrifice hours of rest or time with Kaleb to accomplish this. I feel like “Super Mom” thanks to Geni!   

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