Geni

Very well done website! Cleaner look and better price than any of the other genealogy websites. My only concern is MyHeritage bought the website for the data, but then did not add more servers to keep up with the processing.

I appreciate Mike, from Geni customer support who helped me correct the mistake on site, quickly. In his communications with me, he was clear, concise, professional, kind and courteous. I appreciate people who make it happen and do it right and have a positive attitude, like Mike from Geni support team. Way to go Mike. Keep up the good work.
Sam

I've been connecting with many relatives through Geni and am very pleased with my experience. I started with the free version and upgraded to the Pro version after awhile. I also have a data subscription to My Heritage. I began my research with Ancestry but my grandparents all emigrated from Finland, and Ancestry, while good, didn't have as many Finns on the website. There are many on Geni and My Heritage. It's been rewarding for me!

I find Geni to be a fast and easy way to build and share my Family tree with my family. They have tons of privacy setting to let you manage your profile and keep profiles of living and underage family private. By default, they do share deceased profiles with the public unless you mark the profile as private. As a non=paying user I find customer service is great along with the group of curators that are always willing to help you with your own profile, merging trees, or correcting tree info. Geni is a One World Tree as in there goal to connect everyone into one tree alone but as any tree building sites, there are some errors. With the ability to collaborate with others, it is not too hard to fix these errors and create a great tree to share and collaborate with your family.

I am not an employee of Geni, but I really love the program and think it is by far the best tool we have for genealogy. It really pains me to see people who obviously don't know much about Geni, or genealogy, write such negative reviews. If you want to see why Geni is in fact the best program for genealogy, read my blog posts at http://schoenblog.com/?p=712 and http://schoenblog.com/?p=471

If you want to build a tree and keep it to yourself, Geni is not a good fit. If you want to create records and are open to corrections from others - or correcting what others have recorded - Geni is great. Different paradigm. Like lego kits vs freestyle.

I thought I came from a very small family. Have no family members to ask, but since I've joined I now have a family of over 30,000 people I'm connected to. I have messaged with distant cousins from all over the world.

I was charged $1.26 TWICE after canceling my "free" trial. I closed my account too, wayy before the 15 days came up. So glad I use Ancestry instead. They are way better and aren't sneaky with prices for way more resources. I can't even contact anyone because you need a pro account to do so. Great logic?

I was impressed with the amount of information that you can obtain and share with others on geni. The interface is adequate and the overall website rivals other leading genealogy sites. Customer service is EXTREMELY great.

We have belonged to Geni for several years. And not had a problem till we tried working with a collaborator. The woman lied to us add people that aren't real. Didn't say anything till she got the idea we knew more than she expected. She took over management of my husbands profile. And made sure I couldn't delete things on my tree. We had to write an email to customer service and haven't answered my husband. And wouldn't allow me to report my problem. I would not recommend this genealogy site.

Adding the ancestress of the person I was trying to reach put me as her "admin" informed me that I had 2 matches and put a paywall between me and the person I was trying to reach in the first place. Wow, that was rude. I could see the info online before but now that I added it to my tree, I have to have pay for it? That is insane. What a horrible business model. You know what? I would gladly pay geni 119 bucks if they would have this member call me to compare family notes. As is, I deleted the entire tree I entered as not to put a paywall between us and anyone else who may try to connect too those families. I think I am done with Geni. My experience was very disappointing.

DON'T give these guys your credit card details, even if you think it's a free trial, your card will get charged and there is no one of contacting them, they are scammers and thieves as far as I'm concerned, ruined my day.

I was a member for nearly 8 years, started by my son Daniel Fishlow. I built a large family tree. Suddenly my membership disappeared and when I tried to get on I was told I was a new member. The family tree has disappeared also. I cannot get back to my original membership, and my large family tree, because only the "new" one comes up on my screen.

Harriet Fishlow

I've contacted GENI about a user, Nancy D. Coon that has stolen all of my family photos from Ancestry.com and uploaded black and white copies to her trees on GENI with (my family). I never gave this person permission, I don't even know this person, over 30 profiles of photos so far that I've found have been taken of photos that either I, my parents or my grandparents took that all solely belong to me and I think that's absolutely ridiculous they cannot respond to such a gross violation of misconduct from one of their members.

I decided to have a DNA test done so I went to the pull-down menu in Geni took me to the MyHeritage site to order it. Now, after I received the results, found out that Geni does not accept the results from MyHeritage. What kind of scam are they pulling? The only DNA results they use are from a different web site and not the one they direct you to. Do not use Geni.

By reading reviews I see this site is still corrupted as it was a few years ago. Geni.com does steal private date of living relatives, including your parents, your children, inlaws and more. ALL living and passed on relatives info and photos will be takened by the admins/curators and eventually passed on to others by them. They usually will bad the person with some random reason, take over ALL your profiles, keep your photos you upload, everything about you, your kids, your parents all now for their taking and sharing.
I'm really surprised nobody has done anything about this website yet, legally what they are doing seems wrong and almost identity theft because even if you don't use the site Im sure you will find your name on their somewhere with quite a bit of information on you and you can't even do anything about it.
My own photo and name and other info it on their, stolen from me and on their site, I have tried to contact support for help but got nowhere

Be careful before uploading your family tree to Geni because when you do there is no turning back. Geni don't care about users private info. How is this site LEGAL anyway? What about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and customers right. As user you should have full control about what you upload including full right to have your uploaded information DELETED by the database and not stored forever.

Warning. If you choose to delete your account your user data WILL NOT be purged by the Geni database. They don't even tell you what info they keep when you are gone. It stays on... all the messages you've sent to other users will still be there and it is like being locked out from your account.

Geni, once the best place to create a family tree and collaborate with relatives, is now a place of negativity and harassment. I have been on Geni for 15 years and have been very happy. Recently, things took a drastic change. Myself and many other account managers began receiving messages claiming my family does not exist and relatives were made up. A man, who had no family tree of his own and no relation to anyone, began sending daily messages that he was going to delete these profiles. I contacted Geni, who then defended this behavior by saying that all he wants is proof that your Great Grandfather x 13 is a real person. My response is that I cannot provide a paper trail to a person alive in the year 1500. Geni said that they will delete any profile that does not have proof. We all know that proof cannot always be obtained, especially going back over 500 years. So, the messages continued from this disgruntled member saying that my profiles will be deleted. I am helpless now to really provide anything other than oral history and or collaboration with other members who are also related and then also DNA. I was told that I was in the wrong and GENI now allows profiles to be randomly deleted. I guess aggressive cancel culture is now the way things are done on something as simple as a family history site. The world is changing and being aggressively disrespectful is the now the accepted way. This is not the same genealogy it was a few decades ago. I would not recommend GENI as a site. You are always now under the threat of being deleted if GENI or any hostile member wants you or your family removed.

Gee!
You can join for free, but what do you get? NOTHING
In the free version they want all your hard earned information FOR FREE
If you have a question - you have to buy the PRO version, about $120.00 up front to ask.
If you want to contact anyone about more information, you have to but the PRO version
If you want to contact anyone, have to buy the PRO version.
And a lot of the information isn't reliable. A lot of the information is lick & stick, cut and paste. In the Sasser Family there are four set of parents for Howell Sasser.
REALLY?

In other words, you work for them for free and to get anything back, you pay them
I wonder how many people have fallen for, what appears to me as, this scam
But there are a lot of stupid people out there. We see that in every election this country has.

I was using the free version of geni.com to see if I would want an upgrade to pro, but all of a sudden it stopped working, a major disappointment. I cleared my cookies and cache, then tried switching from Safari to Chrome. It still doesn't work! Now I see that it has failed worldwide. MyHeritage has been kept separated from geni.com. Does that mean MyHeritage is fully aware of geni.com's flaws? My condolences to MyHeritage, the lemon owner. To expect anyone to pay $119.40 for something that doesn't work is an insult to their intelligence. Your business model is astounding!
P.S. (added later): Never mind. I just read more of the reviews. It's obvious that the geni lineages are sloppy, inaccurate, poorly curated, and hard to fix. Misinformation in a genealogy renders it a useless waste of effort. Verifying data from the distant past requires dedication, careful documentation, and logical thinking. Splicing together unvetted information invites errors which then propagate. I'll stay with authoritative sources and spend my $119.40 elsewhere.

If I could give zero stars I would. Deceptive from the onset. You can't do researching unless you take a premium membership, nearly $120, billed annually is the only payment option. I finally signed up for the two week trial to discover I STILL couldn't access research and sources UNLESS I joined myheritage.com at another $120 billed annually; again the only payment option. I worked long and hard to put all my family information I knew into their program... none of my stuff was 'sourced'... apparently nothing else on the site is either. I had planned to check sources but that option was not available to me. I kept getting emails with 'matches' and invitations to merge. When I finally did merge with one (to save typing all the data) I rapidly merged with more than 150,000 ancestors! I utilized the copying option and got over 3,300 pages (not entries, but PAGES) of information. It was way more than I wanted to know, messed up my work and took control out of my hands. It cannot be reversed. It was too much for my computer programs to access, let alone print. That's nearly 7 reams of paper! Geni's goal to have the MOST information is incompatible with my intention to do a simple and accurate family tree. Now they've 'hijacked' my work, my personal information. Glad I was able to cancel before they billed me... it was a minor inconvenience to cancel my debit card. Stay away from geni, it's about GREED.

From my DNA test, it showed I had a lot of Scandinavian with some Iberian decent. Through using Geni search, it has taken me back to those connections though centuries ago. When I googled closer family ties, I received validation to part of my family tree; going from the American Revolution to Colnial Virgina into England, which I know is factual.
Thus far, I cannot condemn Geni due to at least 8 generations in America to be correct.

I find it very interesting that Geni will take nearly any ancestor I attempt to search into infinity, and bring up a truckload of royals, not to mention, fables and myths. Then when I go back to check these so called Kings and Queens in my background with sites like Find a Grave and WikiTree, the search ends in two generations. Am I to believe that these other sites don't have access to the same long lines of nobles that Geni does? Or is Geni just one giant spoof? It was fun at first, but now that I see that I can not verify the information anywhere else, (except maybe MyHeritage,)I'm starting to see the light. MyHeritage results designated me as male, (I'm not), and said I had NO English, NO Scottish, NO Welsh, and NO Irish in my DNA. Funny how that works, since about 90% of my verifiable ancestors come from those countries. SMDH.