The Geni Blog

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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Send a Mother's Day Gift on Geni

This Sunday, May 11th, is Mother's Day in the United States. Just in time for the celebration we have added custom gifts to help our user's show their love for the mothers in their life. Visit the Mother's Day Gift page to send Mom a message and one of these special gifts:

This Sunday we will send the recipient a link to view your gift and message. We hope this helps make the day more special for your loved ones. Read more on Mother's Day around the world at wikipedia.

Send a Mother's Day Gift

We've changed how stats are calculated

You may notice a reduction in the number of people in your User Stats and Tree counts. This is due to recent changes in terminology. "People in My Blood Tree" (the number of your blood relatives and all of their partners) has replaced the "People in My Tree" (the total number of people you are connected to on Geni). All of the profiles and people that we used to include in your ‘Tree’ count are still right where they were, and you can continue to navigate to them through your tree as you always have.

Many of you have told us that you are very interested in knowing how many people you are connected to on Geni. We understand that this provides a sense of scale and community to your Tree on Geni. Our engineers are working on this request and believe that they have found a solution. Hopefully in the near future you will once again be able to answer the question "How many people am I connected to on Geni?". Stay tuned!

For more information on these changes, please visit the Forest page on the Geni User Wiki.

UPDATE: I am pleased to announce the return of 'the count'! If you visit your Geni home page you will see a new section on the left that looks something like this:

Network Stats

You are connected to XXXX people on Geni.

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New Features - Family Timeline, Calendar, and Discussion

Family Timeline

You can now view your complete family history with the new Timeline tab. The Family Timeline displays all of your Family's events on one timeline to easily visualize the significant events in the lives of those most important to you. Use the Date Range, People, and Event Type filters to see how your paternal and maternal grandparent’s lives overlapped, what your family did from 1920-1928, and more!

View your Family timeline

Calendar Events

In addition to family birthdays and anniversaries, your calendar will now display other upcoming family events. This is a great way to plan shared events such as birthday parties and family reunions. Use the 'Add a new event' button on your calendar to create a new event right from your calendar.

View your calendar

Discussion Topics

The discussion page is now better organized and more private thanks to Topics. When you start a new topic in your discussion, now part of the Home tab, only members of your Family group can participate in that topic. You can view and discuss any topic started by someone in your Family group. We hope this enhancement further facilitates your family's communication.

View your discussion

Family Group In-Laws

Your Family group consists of the relatives that you want to stay in touch with - you share your news, photo albums, birthdays and more with this group. Some users have found the Family group defaults and options too restrictive, especially in the case of in-laws. By default your Family group now includes Inlaws out to 1st cousins. Use your Family Group settings to modify who is in your Family group.

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New Features - Post a Link, Send a Gift

Post a Link

Use Post a Link to easily share a link to any web page, such as an interesting news article, favorite website, or a YouTube video, with your Family. You can also post a link to a source such as a census record or grave image and add it to a relative's profile. 

Posting a link is as simple as adding the URL to the Post a Link field on your Home page and selecting an image, title, description, and who is in the link. This link will appear in the new Posted Links module on your profile and any profile tagged in the link.

Post a Link from your Home page

Send a Gift...

Want to let someone know that you are thinking of them? Send them a free virtual gift on Geni! You can send a hug, a congratulatory handshake, flowers, or some other gift that’s perfect for the occasion. You can also light a candle to memorialize loved ones. You can find the “Send a Gift...” button on your favorite person’s profile under their profile photo.

We'll notify the recipient of your gift and display the gift on their profile. - we'll even include a link so they can give a gift back to you!

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New Features - Much, Much More!

'Identify People' in Photos

Click the 'Identify People' button and then click on a person in a photo to tag them in place and identify who is who. When others view that photo, they will see the name of each person as they mouse over them in the photo. This is especially useful for large group shots such as weddings and family reunions.

View your photos

Invite Enhancements

Because you have more fun when your family joins you on Geni, we've added these enhancements to make it easier for you to invite your family:

• Custom Invites - Use the 'Edit Invitation Template' to customize the invitation your family receives when you invite them to Geni. You can even save your custom invitation to use it again when you invite more of your family. Create a custom invite.
  
• Invite Page - Your invite page now lists all of your living relatives who have not yet joined your tree, sorted by their relationship to you. We hope this will make it easier for you to find and invite your missing relatives. Invite your family.

Merging Nodes

Now you can merge any two nodes in your tree (previously you could not merge two nodes if each had parents). Use the 'Move this person' option in the 'more' menu on the node to add it to the new 'Move These People' sidebar. Then drop the node on another node to merge them. Merging two nodes with existing parents will trigger an additional merge, helping to you to easily and quickly correct any duplicate branches in your tree.

International

We've made some changes to help our international users. You will see more progress on this over the next few releases.

• Custom Invites - You can use custom invites to add a note in your family member's native language before inviting them to the tree.
• Timezones - You can set a timezone for each profile you can edit. In the future we will use this setting to determine when the person receives notifications, birthday reminders, etc.
• Additional Language Fields - The language list on profiles is no longer limited to three languages.

Introducing Your Forest

We have introduced the Forest to help you understand and organize your family relationships on Geni. Your Tree consists of all your blood relatives and their partners; your Forest consists of your Tree, your spouse's Tree, and all those partners’ trees. Your Forest page lists all of the trees in your Forest. We have also introduced enhanced privacy controls based on your Forest so you can further control who can view your information. For more on these changes visit our Forest page. View your Forest.

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Feature Preview - Posted Links

In a few weeks we will release a number of new features on Geni that we are very excited about. Recently we previewed our upcoming Family Timeline feature, and also let you know about some upcoming privacy enhancements. Today I'd like to preview another upcoming feature, Posted Links.

With posted links you can share any web page with your Family and Friends on Geni. Not only is this a great way to share your favorite websites with your family, this is also a way to add online sources and records to your ancestor's profiles. Let me walk you through what this feature will look like when it is released.

Posting a link will be as simple as typing or pasting the URL into the Post Link field on your Home page:

Next, you will be able to select an image from the linked web page, edit the Title and Description, and people tag the link:

This link will appear in the new Posted Links module on your profile and on the profile of anyone you tagged in the link. For example, let's say Lewis Carroll is in your Tree and you've added a link to his grave from findagrave.com. Here is what the Posted Links module on his profile would look like:

You can also use posted links to add a YouTube video of your kids to their profiles, share an interesting book you found on Amazon with your family, and much, much more. As you can see, this is a fun, easy, and useful feature. We hope you will enjoy using it once it is released!

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How-to: Manage Your Profiles

Did you know that when you add a new profile to Geni, you are the 'Profile Manager' of that profile? This means that you have additional control over who can edit and search for these profiles. Here are the default settings for Managed Profiles:

What do these settings mean?

• Who can edit?
• Choose 'Only Me' if you don't want to grant anyone else access to edit these profiles.
• Choose 'Entire Tree' to allow others in your tree to modify these profiles.
• Who can search?
• Entire Tree: Only other users who have joined your Geni Tree will see this person in their search results.
• Anyone: This profile will show up in 'Outside Your Tree' search results. This will help other family members who have not joined your Tree to find shared family members. NOTE: Minors are never included in our public search index.

You'll notice that you can choose separate settings for Living and Deceased Profiles you have added. This enables you to, for example, give your living relatives more privacy than your deceased relatives.

You can also use the 'Searchable by the public' checkbox on any profile you manage (not including minors) to individually include or remove profiles from our public search index.

Keep in mind that when someone claims a profile you have added, they take over control of that profile and you are no longer the manager.

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