MyHeritage -- Snaps Up Geni.com

All members have now agreed that all deceased profiles should be public and living profiles private. This is now Geni's policy and by continuing as a member you have agreed to this.

From this, without changing any rules, Geni can make your private profiles of deceased persons public. They don't need your permission - you have agreed to it.

For anyone to say that this is extreme, and Geni wouldn't do this, I suggest they look at Geni's track record thus far. Our group is reducing all profiles to the basic facts (birth and death) in anticipation of this eventuality.

I have no crystal ball. :). I can only tell you that I cannot change the private / public status set by a manager, and I just tested that with a 2nd cousin's great grandmother, died in the 1940s.

The only case I know of where that could be possible is within the family group by any manager in that group. (I think that's how it works).

Ken, all deceased profiles should be public is not so easy because they would include include minors, siblings and children of Geni users as well. If you had a two years old child that died, would you accept that it is forced to be a public profile?

Bjorn. I agree, but that is now Geni's stated policy - it does not list exceptions.

The most disturbing part of this is that Geni chose to sneak these very major changes in without so much as a blog entry. Perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice.

The respectful silence of all curators (now known as Geni's Brass Band) is noted. With even the curator's not finding it necessary to alert members, it seems that some kind of member's advocate will be necessary for member's to remain part of the system.

Ken part of the reason for the silence is this was released not even 24 hours ago. 2nd - it's Geni policy for Geni to articulate.

Ken, we're all still figuring out what the new features are and how they work. One thing for you, if you block a curator, the curator will not have access to your profiles, ie they will be as private (to him) as before. At least I think that's how it is working. Again, we are all just figuring it out ourselves, so please be kind. We're trying our best to help make Geni great for everyone.

Another user has pointed out that my words above could be mistaken as a statement that I intend to start turning any private, deceased profiles older than 110 year public. That is definitely not the case.

HOWEVER, I may indeed mark 110 year and older "zombie" profiles as deceased.

Curators does not have an option to turn a profile within someones familygroup to public either.

My mother has just seen the message to say that her life membership has been reduced to 5 years. Can she still get the refund?

Private User?

I have not received a messager about a refund because of lifetime membership reduction..
Is there - or is there not a refund?

Hi Gerhard,

My mother did not receive an email about it either, only one telling her that her membership had changed. It is on this thread that I have seen that people have been allowed to apply for a refund, but I don't know how.

How can a lifetime member apply for a refund Geni team?

Private User your mother will need to email customer service and request a refund , the same goes for (No Name)

@charles edmonds

Thank you. I'll let her know. I assume she will still retain the 5-year membership?

I received the following message from Private User

Hi Rafi......can you help me with this question..I wrote to Geni but received no reply..

My lifetime subscription was cancelled by your company can you please tell me what I was given in return.....what was I offered at Heritage etc. as I would like to know the new arrangements..
Thanks and regards from Vienna.........

Rafi we contacted Stephen Fried

@ Charles Edmonds
You wrote to me that the good news was that I got a precious gift, a 5-year MyHeritage data subscription (worth $ 600) at no extra cost to me.

My status at MyHeritage is right now (Basic). It does not cost $ 600
Can you explain this?

Best Regards
Finn Østergaard

Finn Østergaard,

What you have is a subscription to the all of the databases that they have there.

You will need it in the near future as there is a nice addition that is coming to Geni, but I can't say what it is at this time.

Kevin

Okay, now we're hooked up to the data base from MyHeritage...cool. Now what I don't understand is why I'm being asked for a service fee for that access when I'm a paying for a"Pro" membership? I was under the impression that my Pro membership included access to data which up until now was very scant, and mostly lead to Ancestry.com.

Wish we could be hooked up to Ancestry.com instead.

Hmmm, smart matches? Can't be smarter than the input.
I have tested some of the matches and really found some new data here
and there, a new child or the date of burial. And it is good to get the MH source into the profile. The tree is not changed.
To get more information about the trees behind the MH-profiles seems to require another monthly fee.

On the other hand I have more than 80 blue dots, some with even more than 40 MH-matches and a lot of them seem to be totally irrelevant and redundant information.
I would like to have the capability to turn the blue dots off ! Please make this the next project. Smart matching is - to say frankly - totally overestimated and cannot replace research, libraries and local church books.

I have my special test sample, the imaginary Borcholdts, a profile with 41 matches which are more or less identical; submittet from different people and copied from some diffuse third hand information.
The information given from the MH submitters is not proven at all, and according to local researchers it is simply wrong. The links below show the 41 smart matches and also the local source ...you need to be able to read Swedish, however.
http://www.myheritage.se/FP/record-matches.php?action=showAdHocReco...
http://www.myheritage.se/FP/record-matches.php?action=showAdHocReco...

Do you have means to reduce identical MH-profiles ?

And the very best sample to the "blue-dot-confusion" is the "Stenbrikke/Eberstein case" which was created to prove ones relationship to the pharaos, to Odin, the mongols and Cleopatra.

So far I have not really found any profound "blue-dot-information", maybe some others have ? By the way, I had a lifetime subscription which now was replaced by the revolutionary "blue-dot". Maybe somebody else is impressed and can explain the advantages.
Finally it's all about our money and MH's business.

hvis jeg helt forstår Gerhardt

så er det også hvad jeg kunne ønske at man fjernede alle disse blå faldskærne

man kunne erstatte dem med noget man selv kunne vælge om man ønsker at se på

vores skærm billede er fuldstændigt forvirrende at se på

kommer man ind på profilen begynder det hele st snurre forvirrende

alle disse match som , mange er sort snak .

Sorry, I have made a mistake.
Once you have accepted a blue dot you seem do have access to all MH data without extra fee.

Why has a customer to be a test person?

I collaborate with so many people that the Matches are cluttering up my newsfeed. Geni, can you add a Filter for it, so I can filter out that others are making matches with MyHeritage? Thanks.

MRA - I will second your request for that filter, I can see where the flood of collaborators Matches could become a real nuisance in one's newsfeed.

I'd also like to request a way to hide the blue dots for MH Smart Matches since it would seem that if I choose not to pay the MH monthly fee I can never confirm matches and make the dots go away, they will remain as an eternally annoying distraction.

If you pay for MyHeritage, is there any reason also pay to be Pro member on Geni?

Ann Fuller (c) Tree matches, Enhanced Search, Split Trees (relationship disconnects), etc.

All this excitement about the possibilities, why did no one (on Geni blog) just informed us that you need a payed subscription? Just be honest about that, tell it like it is and than tell the advantages (assumed there are, and I want to believe there can or will be, for those who are interested in it). But why only saying who this is so good and that is so good, just tell you need to pay for it instead of us let us find out ourselves. I prefer things to be told as they are.
Maybe that's a Dutch thing? :-)

It's quite a long blog post, but it does clearly state that a subscription is required:

"Viewing the list of matches is free, as is drilling-down and viewing full records from certain free data collections such as Find-A-Grave or the 1940 Federal US census. A MyHeritage Data subscription is required to view other historical records in full, and to confirm matches. MyHeritage Data subscriptions work on both Geni and MyHeritage and also provide unlimited access to MyHeritage SuperSearch, a powerful search engine for historical records with more than 4 billion records."

OK George, I did not read that, maybe because it was a long blog post. If I had read it earlier than I was not that confused whole day. Than I would have known not to bother because I was not going to pay for a subscription on MH and I could ignore the whole thing. Now I was asking lots of things about this all, because I had no idea how it worked and what the pro's and con's were.I did not know what the effect was of aproving a match and what it would do wiht my Geni profiles, so I did not try and asked anything what I was wondering. So when I finally signed in for MH (without a subscription) and aproved 1 match I saw this "subscription tool". Too much info for me on Geni blog to understand, even when I used google translate. So I missed the information. Only giving a lot of information on Geni blog is not enough, it is too much to understand. For me. Cannot think I am the only one who did not consume all the info.