Geni.com
Here’s another mostly free genealogy research site.
Geni.com is an American commercial genealogy and social networking website, founded in 2006 and owned by another private company MyHeritage since November 2012. MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website, though the Smart Matches™ feature enables the matching of Geni profiles to trees on MyHeritage. As of December 2021, more than 160 million profiles had been created on Geni.
A basic Geni account is free, but there are options that allow you greater access if you want to pay for the privilege. I had a “Pro” account for a while but chose to revert to the free version because I can get what I need without paying anything.
Geni is similar in a lot of ways to Wikitree, which I wrote about last Thursday. Users can upload their trees, which are then connected to the “one world” tree maintained on the site. Geni has partnered with Family Tree DNA to allow users to upload their DNA results to the site.
I’ll use the same person I used last week – William Brewster IV – to illustrate what you can learn from Geni.
When you scroll down his profile page, you see a set of tabs that lets you know the information the site contains about William Brewster.
This tells me that I’ll find 183 images or other media, 13 discussions, and 59 sources if I keep scrolling down the page. This is a fine trove of information that I’ll be able to look at quickly. The overview goes on for pages, including the text of some of the source documents. This is very easy to use, as you don’t have to go clicking around to read these sources. They’re all in front of you.
There’s frequently not a lot of difference between Geni and Wikitree, at least not for my purposes. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the profiles of my 5th great-grandfather Parley Brown on these sites.
When I’m researching, I usually keep Wikitree and Geni tabs open; if I find that I’m stuck on finding a particular piece of information or making a particular connection, a suggestion on one of these sites sometimes helps me get unstuck. In particular, I find the source listings useful, and I enjoy reading the discussion among researchers who are trying to resolve discrepancies in the relevant information.
One caveat:the power of Geni is most useful if you have a MyHeritage account, which is not free. This makes Geni different from Wikitree, which never has any cost associated with any of its features.