The differences
On Sunday, The Legal Genealogist set out to test the new DNA interface at Geni.com, and ran into a snag: trying to understand just how Geni fit into the MyHeritage corporate model.
The more I tried to unravel it using the help at the MyHeritage and Geni websites, the more confused I got.
So I invited the folks at MyHeritage and at Geni to explain the two to me, and to us all.
Here’s the first part of that explanation.
What are the differences between Geni and MyHeritage?
Overview
“MyHeritage was founded in Israel in 2003.
“Geni was founded in California in 2007.
“In November 2012, MyHeritage acquired Geni and since then Geni is a fully-owned subsidiary of MyHeritage.
“Geni is developed and maintained separately from MyHeritage, and the Geni team reports to the executive team of MyHeritage.”
Comparison of MyHeritage and Geni
“Both services allow users to build their family tree, explore and preserve their family history and share it with their family members.
“Both services are global and support more than 40 languages.
“Geni is available on Geni.com.
“MyHeritage is available on MyHeritage.com (in English) and on more than 30 other domains in other languages (e.g. myheritage.de in German, myheritage.fr in French, and so on).
“MyHeritage is the larger among the two services.
“MyHeritage currently has approximately 83.2 million registered users. Geni currently has approximately 10.6 million registered users, of which 1.8 million are also on MyHeritage. Together they have 92 million unique registered users.
“MyHeritage currently has more than 2 billion profiles and 5 billion additional historical records.
“Geni currently has more than 160 million profiles, and no historical records.
“MyHeritage provides a Website, mobile app and desktop app (Family Tree Builder) that work together.
“Geni provides a Website and does not provide mobile and desktop apps.
“MyHeritage includes a search engine for historical records, called SuperSearch.
“Geni does not include a search engine for historical records.
“Geni has a team of more than 200 volunteer curators who help Geni users and help curate and improve the quality of the World Family Tree.
“MyHeritage doesn’t have curators.”
Different Approaches
“MyHeritage and Geni are kept separate because they follow two different approaches.
“Geni’s mission is to create a single family tree connecting all the people in the world. Geni calls it the World Family Tree. This is a collaborative effort. On Geni, users do not own independent trees; they manage profiles in the World Family Tree. Technically, a new tree on Geni begins as an independent tree but quite quickly matches are found between that tree and the World Family Tree, and once duplicate profiles are merged, the tree becomes part of the World Family Tree. When a tree is part of the World Family Tree, it means that a relationship path is available between any profile in that tree and the more than 100 million profiles in the World Family Tree.
“MyHeritage takes a different approach, it is a huge collection of more than 30 million private trees each owned by a single owner – the person who started the tree. Trees on MyHeritage remain separate and are never merged. On Geni, any user can modify any public profile, and on MyHeritage only the tree owner (and specific people that he/she invites) can modify any information in a tree.
“MyHeritage allows users to import a GEDCOM, creating a separate private tree.
“On Geni, GEDCOM import is deliberately not allowed, to prevent duplication, so new users on Geni need to re-build their tree on Geni, person by person. Very quickly, however, most people find that part of their tree is already on Geni and what they do is add only the missing pieces.
“Geni’s approach has some unique advantages. Geni’s World Family Tree has almost no duplication, which is the cause of many problems in genealogy. This creates, over time, a very high quality tree in which research is leveraged and is not duplicated. Geni allows extreme collaboration, where anyone can edit anything, thus if people spot a mistake they can go ahead and simply fix it, making Geni better every day. However, some users find Geni unsuitable for their genealogy and research approach, as they get upset when others modify a portion of the tree that they entered or they consider “theirs”. Some of these modifications could be beneficial and some could be considered harmful, just like multiple people can edit an entry on Wikipedia (with the help of curators), sometimes without agreement, but often this process converges until most people are satisfied with the result.
“If you have a tree on MyHeritage, other people, who may be strangers or relatives, cannot modify your tree.
“Geni allows you to find your relationship to thousands of famous people – celebrities, scientists, kings and queens, and to other Geni users, thanks to the World Family Tree. It shows how everyone is connected. This is not possible on MyHeritage, where relationships can only be shown inside one’s private tree. The World Family Tree currently covers 104 million profiles out of the Geni’s 162 million profiles, and it is considered the world’s largest collaborative family tree – it has almost no duplicates, and any duplicates added are quickly found and merged by Geni’s users and curators. Search for Thomas Alva Edison on Geni and you will find exactly one profile showing you his entire family, whereas on any other family tree website, including MyHeritage, you will find dozens of trees that include him, some better than others, but no single tree with the best of the best information, curated, as Geni provides. On the other hand, trees on MyHeritage provide their owner with more control as strangers cannot modify them.
“The different approaches of the two websites is the reason why MyHeritage didn’t merge Geni and MyHeritage into a single service, but kept them separate. Which approach is better? Each user can decide for himself/herself and use the service that he/she prefers.”
(Tomorrow: the DNA interface with MyHeritage and Geni — and the subscription costs.)
Is there any difference in approach between Geni World Family Tree and Family Search Family Tree?
“Some of these modifications could be beneficial and some could be considered harmful, . . . but often this process converges until most people are satisfied with the result.” Just because “most people are satisfied” is no guarantee of quality research. I’d like to know where elements of the Genealogical Proof Standard fit in Geni’s approach. Or really any genealogy website’s approach. Where is a company that is providing leadership in helping all genealogists, novice to professional, understand what actually constitutes a high quality family tree?
I have read numerous complaints from genealogists who have serious issues with Geni on this account, including complaints that the Geni “curators” have blocked them from editing well-documented profiles they submitted to correct changes made by others, such as changing a child’s parentage, linking a person to another family of similar name but from a totally different community, etc., without the “curator” ever giving them a reason for overruling the documentary evidence supporting the profile as originally submitted.
In my experience, the complaints about Geni are almost always unfounded or due to misunderstandings. See http://schoenblog.com/?p=471 and http://schoenblog.com/?p=712 where I explain and answer the most commonly heard complaints.
Amen, Lesley!
@Robert Kirk,
The approaches of Geni’s World Family Tree and FamilySearch’s family tree are very similar: both aspire to create a single tree of the world. The differences are in the method and quality of the implementation.
Geni has many curators and focuses on removing duplication through merges, and striving for quality. FamilySearch doesn’t have curators and historically it focused more on quantity than on quality.
For that reason GEDCOM files were always welcome at FamilySearch, but not welcome on Geni.
FamilySearch always advocated for caution, advising the user: if you are not totally sure about what you’re doing, add your version of the truth, but don’t touch anything else, things will get sorted out later. Such caution may be a good thing, but it led to more duplication. Even if you make changes on FamilySearch’s tree, you are modifying your view of the tree, not the underlying data that everyone else sees, and duplication increases.
Collecting a large number of highly duplicated GEDCOM files that were not merged has contributed further to FamilySearch’s tree becoming a mess. FamilySearch surely intends to clean-up the tree one day, and perhaps it is already being cleaned up, but the current situation is still very tangled.
As in the example mentioned, Geni has one profile for Thomas Edison, but FamilySearch has 113 of them (if you enter the right birth and death years). Visit Geni’s profile of Thomas Edison and you will see a biography and pictures of him and most of his family members. Many genealogists would agree that this is high quality. For any new information about Thomas Edison, there is exactly one place to go to in order to add it. On FamilySearch there are fewer photos and even when there are pictures it’s hard to find them because of the duplication, you wouldn’t know which of the 113 Thomas Edison profiles to visit in order to see pictures, and then you won’t see pictures of his family members in one location.
Some individuals on FamilySearch are duplicated not hundreds of times, but thousands of times. Some areas on the FamilySearch tree have even become corrupted, with a person having multiple sets of parents that seem to be the same, or having dozens of siblings, but really these are just a few unique siblings, duplicated.
Geni provides matches between profiles, and FamilySearch currently doesn’t. So FamilySearch doesn’t alert its users to the presence of duplicates. When duplicates are hidden from view, it’s no wonder that nothing gets done to merge them. Geni’s matches alert profile owners and allow them to initiate a merge which keeps the best information from both profiles and converts them into a single profile.
Geni has support for multilingual profiles, so the same profile can have a name in English, a separate name in Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, etc. FamilySearch doesn’t support this, it does allow having multiple names per person (which is another cause for a mess) but not clearly designated by language.
But there is another difference that you should be aware of, which is perhaps the most important one. Anything you upload to Geni is your data, and you can delete it if you wish. If you are the sole manager of a profile, then you can delete it in a click, and it’s gone for good. If you want to delete a profile managed by you and additional users, it’s trickier – you can delete it, but its other managers will be notified and may decide to resurrect it. For example, if you delete your grandfather, if your cousin is also on Geni and it’s his grandfather also, he may decide that he wants the grandfather to remain there. If you can’t sort things out with your cousin, you can contact Geni customer support and if your reason is legit they will delete the profile permanently for you.
On FamilySearch, by contrast, you can never delete information you upload to the tree. It is considered theirs, forever, according to the FamilySearch privacy policy.
Hopefully this helps you understand the similarities, and the differences, between Geni’s World Family Tree and FamilySearch’s tree.
Winston Churchill once said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Similarly, in my opinion, Geni is the worst tree out there, except for all the others.
Perhaps one day, in the distant future, there will be only one single family tree of the world, and everyone would turn to that reference for any family tree lookup.
“…As in the example mentioned, Geni has one profile for Thomas Edison, but FamilySearch has 113 of them (if you enter the right birth and death years)…”
Correction: I just came from familysearch.org and did a search for first names: Thomas, last names: Edison, birth year 1847 and death year 1931 and got only 4 strong matches not the “113” profiles mentioned in the comment. And of the 4 only one with the PID# of LZ2Q-W96 is clearly the inventor. The contributor of the comment must be doing some other search to come up with 113 matches. I see a single well researched profile for the inventor not 113.
“…Geni provides matches between profiles, and FamilySearch currently doesn’t….”
Correction: familysearch.org has a “possible duplicates” button on each profile. Clicking on it will return possible matches between profiles on familysearch. Geni however does provide icons on the tree view of profiles that have likely duplicates making the discovery of likely dups a more prominent and easier to discover feature of the geni. Regardless of the implementation duplicates can be discovered in both websites.
“…On FamilySearch, by contrast, you can never delete information you upload to the tree. It is considered theirs, forever, according to the FamilySearch privacy policy…”
Correction: On familysearch.org you can delete any profile that you are the sole contributor on. As you point out you can also do the same thing on geni.com.
One additional correction:
“…Even if you make changes on FamilySearch’s tree, you are modifying your view of the tree, not the underlying data that everyone else sees, and duplication increases…”
Correction: On familysearch living individuals are always private profiles and the comments about “you are modifying your view of the tree” are correct but only when talking about profiles of living profiles. If however the comment was meant to imply the same for deceased profiles then the statement quoted is not correct. On all deceased profiles for individuals on familysearch all edits and contributions are shared by all contributors. For these deceased profiles familysearch, just like geni, users are operating on a shared family tree.
Now there are a few “edge” cases on both familysearch and geni where the methodology mentioned above does not apply.
Takeaway–In most instances both geni and familysearch are both collaborative shared trees.
@Randy Stebbing
You are incorrect.
There are 113 Thomas Alva Edison profiles on FamilySearch.
You can see them here:
https://familysearch.org/search/tree/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3A%22thomas%20alva%22~%20%2Bsurname%3Aedison~%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1847-1847~%20%2Bdeath_year%3A1931-1931~
By contrast, this is the single Thomas Alva Edison profile on Geni:
https://www.geni.com/people/Thomas-Edison/6000000002447264491
which is superior in terms of quality, detail,
photographs including of family members, etc.
You wrote:
Correction: On familysearch.org you can delete any profile that you are the sole contributor on. As you point out you can also do the same thing on geni.com.
This is incorrect. Even if you delete it, it remains on FamilySearch forever.
LDS members have disclosed this fact to me, and the privacy policy on FamilySearch admits it.
See https://familysearch.org/privacy
5. Retention. We retain collected personal information and submissions for a reasonable period of time to fulfill the collection purpose and then delete it from our records, with the exception of limited historical profile information, general genealogy records, and membership information retained as part of a permanent genealogical or Church historical record.
Once you upload anything to a family tree on FamilySearch, they have the data forever, they own it forever, and there is nothing you can do to get it removed permanently from their servers.
Those 113 Edison profiles are old contributions from a diversity of ‘sources’, and are not associated with the shared Family Tree that you can cooperate on.
In the shared Family Tree, profiles can have the same quality as profiles on Geni, although it may be more difficult to achieve that goal. because of the lack of curators. And especially when people connect to the tree through a desktop program like Ancestral Quest or RootsMagic, or another one, people may not realize that they’re working with other people, whereas it is quite obvious if you work on-line.
FamilySearch is free, Geni is not, meaning that Geni relies on paying users to take care of merging etc., which you can’t do well with a free account. And in the end, that may very well mean that the shared tree on FamilySearch will become better than the one on Geni.
I think this discussion of who’s better can be put to rest now. The answer is, whichever one you use — because it doesn’t matter one bit if the data isn’t there.
I have a problem with my geni.com account and when attempting to get help after reading their FAQ on this problem, I received this as a response:
Your request (#84469) has been received.
If you are a Basic user (without Geni Pro or Geni Plus) looking for assistance in using Geni, please refer to our FAQ’s and Community Help Forum: http://help.geni.com/home
For password resets, please see the following link: http://help.geni.com/entries/466610-Lost-Password
If you are a Geni Pro/Plus member, your request will be reviewed by our support staff as soon as possible. You may review the status of this request and add additional comments by following the link below:
http://help.geni.com/requests/84469
For all other inquiries, your request will be reviewed by our support staff as soon as possible. Please note that
support inquiries by Geni Pro and Geni Plus members are handled in higher priority than other inquiries.
Please note: The problem I have said it could only be corrected by them and that I had to contact subscriptions. So I guess their stand is, unless you pay you don’t get help!
Hi Connie, we have received your help request and Customer Service will respond. Please note the line in that message that reads, “For all other inquiries, your request will be reviewed by our support staff as soon as possible.” — Geni deals with all tickets, of users who are paying or not, but paying users enjoy higher priority.
Kind regards,
Mike at Geni
You can also get help from any of the curators. Often that is faster than customer service. https://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-Curators/9960 And there is also a Help button at the bottom of your Geni home page that leads to a Knowledge Base where you can search through previously asked questions and take advantage of other self-help tools, such as Help Topics, Video Tutorials, and Community Help forums.
I love all the sites and use Ancestry and Family Search extensively for research, but I have my tree on Geni. The various sites have different strengths in my opinion and complement each other well.
Usually, if I search for someone on Geni the result(s) appear as a MyHeritage SuperSearch result, which I have limited access to without being a paid member. Therefore, I’m now a non-member of either site.
I currently subscribe to MyHeritage. I finally had to cancel their use of my credit card. In eMail exchanges they would never clarify their billing practices. I would not get involved further with a company displaying such deceptive business practices.