Sunday, November 11, 2007

Geni - Genealogy - Free Family Tree

Anyone interested in a free online family tree? I am! So recently I found Geni (at geni.com), which is exactly that. It has a very nice and intuitive UI, it's very easy to add people, or see the collective list of birthdays and anniversaries (did you know the the 12th wedding anniversary is also known as Silk?), and so on. I sure could have used it when I was a kid, and I had to make a family tree (mind you, it was before, or just at the beginning of the days of the PC).

However, if you do use it, you should know a few things which I found the hard way:

  1. It's not perfect - it sometimes gets stuck when you add people, so you need to close the window and log on again.
  2. You can export your family tree to the GEDCOM format (a common genealogy format), but you cannot import GEDCOM files yet.
  3. Once you invite people, there is no way you can stop them doing whatever they want in your family tree. This one caused me to dump the first family tree I was working on, and create a new one from scratch, which was kind of a bummer.
Any other tips would be welcome of course!

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