The Geni Blog

New Feature - Find Your Family

Geni is a collaborative tool that you and your family can use to build a common family history. With the new Find Your Family feature, you can quickly get your family on Geni to help you build your tree and create a scrapbook of your lives, even if you aren’t sure exactly how they are related.

Find Your Family

The easiest way to find family members on Geni is to search your address book. You can import addresses from Outlook, Webmail (such as gmail or yahoo), or from your Address Book. We’ll select anyone that we think you are related to and let you choose your other relatives. You can also invite friends - unrelated people you want to share your photos, videos, events with.

Your relatives will receive an invitation to join Geni they can use to start building their tree. They will also appear in your tree’s sidebar; you can start building their tree for them, and merge it into yours when the trees overlap.

Keep in mind:

• Geni will not store your password or contact information
• Geni will never email anyone without your direct consent

Find Your Family now

Requests Inbox

The new Requests Inbox helps you manage requests you’ve sent and received on Geni. Now you can quickly view a history of Family, Tree, and Friend requests that you have sent and received. Right from the Requests Inbox, you can accept, decline, cancel, remind, and message users. You will find the Requests Inbox in the Inbox subtab of your Home tab.

Unknown Gender

A new ‘Unknown’ option for gender lets you add relatives of unknown gender. This is useful for adding ancestors with uncertain genders, such as children with unusual names. Profiles with unknown gender will appear as green in your tree.

Sending Gifts to your Family

 

Whether it is their birthday, anniversary, or "just because", sending a virtual gift is a great way to show someone that you care. We've given each user three free gift credits to try out our our new, enhanced virtual gifts:

• Expanded Gift Selection: We've completely revised our gifts, with higher quality graphics and a better selection than ever. We'll add more gifts in the future to help your family celebrate holidays and other special events.
• Birthday & Anniversary Gifts: Birthday and Anniversary greetings are one of the most popular features on Geni. Now you can enhance your greetings with a virtual gift, which will be delivered in the guestbook along with your message.
• Gift Greetings: Every gift now includes a 'greeting' field you can use to add a personalized message to the gift. This greeting will appear in the recipient's guestbook.
• Advanced Purchase Discount: When you purchase 10 or 20 gifts in advance, you get half-off the dollar per gift price - that's 20 gifts for $10! Note that all credit card and transaction pages use SSL for extra security.
• Three Free Gifts!: As a gift to our current users, we've given each of your three free gift credits you can use to send gifts to your family. Send a gift now.

Enhanced Privacy, Search, and Events

Finding and staying in touch with your family on Geni is easier than ever with these recent enhancements:

Privacy

Geni protects the privacy of your information by restricting who can see your profile. By default, only your Family Group and your Family’s Family can see your profile:

• Your Family Group: These are the people you actively follow on Geni -- in your Family Newsfeed, Family Photos and Videos, and Family Calendar. By default it consists of you and your spouse’s 5th cousins and closer. You can define this group by degrees of relationship, or by adding or removing people individually.
• Your Family’s Family: These are the people in your Family Group’s Family Group. In other words, you share a family member in common with them. These people can see your profile, but you do not follow each other. You can use Geni’s privacy settings to hide some or all of your profile information from them.

No one outside these groups can see your profile. If you want your profile to be publicly visible, you can change your search settings.

Search

Search results are now divided between profiles “Connected to You” and “Not Connected to You”:

• “Connected to You”: These profiles are in trees directly or indirectly connected to your tree. This makes finding relatives and inlaws much easier than previously.
• “Not Connected to You”: These profiles are in other Geni trees. You can use it to search for relatives in other trees and then seek to merge those trees. By default, only users and deceased people appear in these search results; living profiles who haven’t joined Geni yet are not searchable by the public. You can change these search settings for yourself and the profiles you’ve added.

Events

The distinction between participant, attendee, and fans of events has been removed. Each event now has a creator and associated people. This simplifies event creation and privacy. In addition, you can now edit your family's events to create a more complete timeline of your family history.

View your family timeline

More Enhancements

Family News Filter Select the types of stories you see in your Family News with the new story-type filter. Want to only see upcoming birthday and anniversaries? You can do it. Just photos, videos, and gifts? Yep, no problem!

Video Your family videos on Geni now have date, location, and description fields. Photos also get the new description field.

Tree Preferences Use the new "Open profiles in new window" to keep your tree in one window while viewing and editing profiles in another browser window.

GEDCOM Import You can now import GEDCOM files with up to 50,000 records. Profiles that are over 125 years old in your GEDCOM will automatically be marked as deceased when imported, and we now expose place names imported from your GEDCOM.

New Feature - Family Videos

Do you have a collection of family videos sitting on a shelf? Do you use a webcam to chat with distant relatives? Videos are a great way to capture special events and communicate with your family, but until now, they've been hard to organize and share. From baby's first steps to wedding anniversaries, from family reunions to family interviews, now you can use Geni to organize and share your family videos.

Geni's new video feature is free, fast and private:

• Unlimited uploads with no fees
• Simple upload process
• Your videos are only viewable by your family

You can instantly tag which family members are in your videos and permanently archive your videos by adding them to an event on your family timeline. Multiple people in your family can tag their media (photos and videos) with a common event, thereby creating a virtual scrapbook of that event. For example, multiple family members can instantly create a virtual scrapbook of a wedding by tagging all their photo albums and videos with that event. Adding videos to individual profiles and events adds another dimension to your family history. Your Family will be notified when you upload new videos, so they can view the videos and add comments. Uploading a video is easy, so get started today!

Upload a Family Video

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New Feature - Tree Merging

When you invite someone to your tree who is already part of another tree on Geni, they can now choose to merge their profiles into one profile. Once these profiles have been merged, they can use Geni’s conflict resolution tools to merge any other nodes that were duplicated on each tree, creating one family tree that is more complete and accurate than the individual trees. Because Geni is a collaborative environment, everyone in your family benefits from this process. Read on for more details on how this process works.

Tree Merging

When you add an email address to a profile (whether creating a new profile or editing an existing one) we check to see if that address is already used on another Geni tree. If it is, a merge request will be sent to the person asking if they would like the profiles to be merged. This invitation works just like the regular invitation process, only you will be bringing along the other profiles in the existing tree as well.

• Tree merges are only initiated when someone on one tree invites someone on another tree to join their tree.
• The person invited can choose whether or not to accept the invitation.
• Trees are only merged when approved by someone in each tree.

Profile Merging

Along with tree merging, we've made the following enhancements to profile merging:

• The secondary profile is automatically deleted if none of the data conflicts with the main profile
• Data conflicts are now presented in a table. You can individually select which value to keep, or skip a field to leave the data conflict for another time
• The buttons for completing or undoing a pending merge have been renamed to describe more clearly what they do.
• Previously you would have received a permission error if you tried to resolve a conflict in the tree (the yellow triangle icon) and you did not have permission to merge a nearby relative. Now you can enter the merge flow even though you can't merge into profiles without the proper merge permission. You will see a padlock on any profile you don't have permission to merge into.

Future plans:

We expect future releases to include the following, in no particular order:

• Merge your GEDCOM file directly into your existing Geni tree.
• Invite "disconnected" relatives. If you want to invite a relative to Geni, but don't know exactly how you're related to them, this feature will enable them to join the site and start building their tree. When you two finally bump into each other, we'll merge the trees.
• Automated merging and automated merge completion. Who wants to deal with 1,000 merge issues?
• Matching by name. You mean you're related to Charles de Gaulle too? Put 'er there, cousin! Before we enable this we need to make sure that you can have 50,000 blood relatives without degrading performance.

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New Features - Much, Much More!

Anniversary Reminders

With Anniversary Reminders you'll never forget to congratulate your family on an anniversary again. One week before the anniversary, we'll send you a reminder to leave a special anniversary greeting. Your message will appear on the profiles of both spouses on the special day along with a special anniversary icon. Make sure you add your wedding date to your profile so your family can send you their wishes on your special day!

Add Immediate Family

Quickly adding someone's entire family to your tree is now easier than ever with the "Add Immediate Family" feature. Select this option from the "more" menu on any node in your tree to add that person's entire immediate family at one time. You can add parents, siblings, spouses, and children along with details of each person using one simple form:

Home page

We've added some new features to your Geni Home Page to help bring your family even closer together:

• The Recently Online module tells you which of your family members has visited Geni recently. This helps you find the active users in your tree to help communication and increase collaboration.
• User Stats now appear on your Home page in the form of Tree Stats. Not only are your stats more accessible, we've also added your spouse's stats (if applicable) for comparison.
• The new Complete Your Family module gives you a simple way to invite your closest relatives to join you on Geni.

Relative Relationship Pathway

By default, when you view a profile on your tree we use your profile as the starting point of the relationship pathway. Now you can choose a different profile as the starting point of the relationship pathway, enabling you to view the relationship between any two people in your tree.

To select a new starting point, navigate to the profile and click the green push pin to the right of the relationship description. When you view another profile, the relationship pathway will be displayed from the perspective of the selected starting profile. To reset the starting profile back to yourself, click the push pin again from any other profile.

Note the push pin does not appear on your profile because relationships are shown from the perspective of your profile by default.

More

• Family Discussion: You no longer need to load a new page to start a topic or post a reply, and viewing a thread takes you directly to the end of the conversation
• Generations to display: There are now separate controls for choosing how many ancestors and descendants to display in your tree
• Photo comment icon: When you are viewing a page of photos, you will see a quote buble icon on any photo that has comments.This is one way to find the photos that your family finds interesting.
• Managed by: The name of the profile manager is now displayed on each managed profile to facilitate collaboration
• Cause of death: You are now able to notate how someone passed with the 'Cause of Death' field. This is a great way to collaborate with your family on your shared medical history. This information will appear on the person's profile and their death event.

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Time Magazine 50 best websites - Vote for Geni!

Time Magazine has named Geni one of the top 50 websites of 2008! Here is what they say about Geni:

For an exercise that's all about family, researching your genealogy can be an oddly lonesome affair, filled with long hours spent sifting through records and making awkward phone calls to far-flung relatives. But Geni turns tree-building into a collaborative effort: the free site gives you the basic tools for diagramming your ancestry, and it also lets you invite others to contribute. If you're serious about tracing your lineage, you'll probably still click on stalwarts like Ancestry.com, Family Search and the USGenWeb Project for their vast digital archives, but Geni makes it easier — and more fun — than ever to create and share your family tree.

They are asking users to select and rate their favorite websites from this list. You can rate Geni on this page. Use the rating slider to rate Geni on a scale of 1 to 100, then click submit.

There are a lot of other great sites in the top 50, so make sure you browse around after you vote for Geni.

Vote for Geni Now

New Dads and Grads Gifts on Geni!

June is the month that we celebrate Dads and Grads, and we’ve added some new free gifts just for them!

Dads

This Sunday, June 15th, is Father's Day in 51 countries around the world. Visit the Father's Day Gift page to honor the fathers in your life with a personal message and one of these special gifts:

Send a Father's Day greeting to any dad in your tree

Grads

Do you have any recent or soon to be graduating students in your family? Use the "Send a Gift..." button on the graduate's profile to send them one of these special graduation gifts:

New Feature - GEDCOM Import!

We are excited to announce that you can build your Geni tree from your GEDCOM file! Geni is now the easiest and best way to share your research with your family.

Importing your GEDCOM is easy:

1. Go to the GEDCOM Import page.
2. Fill out the form and upload your GEDCOM file.
3. Indicate who you are in your file.
4. You're done!

Geni will import your GEDCOM file and build your tree for you. You can begin filling out your profile information right away. Once your GEDCOM has been processed and your Geni tree is built you will receive another email.

Please Note: Importing a GEDCOM will create a new Geni Tree. If you already have a Geni account you must use a different email address for this import. This will start a new Tree which will not be merged into your existing Tree. We plan to enable GEDCOM Import into existing Trees in the future.

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