geni.com
Geni.com is a genealogy website where people work together on one large, shared family tree.
What makes Geni.com different?
Most family tree websites give each user a separate tree.
Geni tries to connect those trees into one shared World Family Tree.
Its central idea works like Wikipedia because relatives can improve the same profiles instead of making many copies.
Geni says its connected tree now contains more than 211 million profiles.
The larger search system covers more than 280 million profiles, including profiles outside the fully connected tree.
This shared design is Geni’s greatest strength and its biggest risk.
Another user may find useful facts about your ancestor, but that user may also add a wrong date, place, or family link.
How does the shared family tree work?
You begin with yourself and add parents, grandparents, partners, children, and other relatives.
Geni checks new profiles against existing ones and looks for possible duplicates.
When two profiles describe the same person, users can merge them and join their family branches.
A successful merge may connect your small tree to millions of distant relatives.
Each profile can hold names, dates, places, photos, documents, notes, and source citations.
Names and biographies can also appear in several languages, which helps families with roots in different countries.
Volunteer curators help resolve difficult merges, protect important profiles, and improve parts of the tree.
Users can also join research projects about a surname, region, historic event, or group of people.
Is Geni.com free to use?
A free Basic account lets you create unlimited profiles, invite relatives, add sources, resolve duplicates, use projects, and store up to one gigabyte of media.
This is enough for a person who wants to build a family tree slowly and work with relatives.
Geni Pro adds full profile search, unlimited Tree Matches, unlimited media storage, priority support, relationship diagrams, and a research workspace.
The listed price for one year of Geni Pro is US$149 plus tax.
Geni also offers a 14-day Pro trial, which requires payment details and must be canceled if you do not want it to renew.
A Basic user can export a GEDCOM file with up to 5,000 profiles, while a Pro user can export up to 50,000 profiles.
Does Geni include historical records?
Geni is mainly a shared tree platform, not a complete historical record library.
It can show Record Matches and Smart Matches from MyHeritage, but opening and confirming many of those records may require a separate MyHeritage data subscription.
This difference can surprise people who expect Geni Pro to include a large collection of census, birth, marriage, and death records.
MyHeritage bought Geni in 2012, but the two websites still serve different jobs.
Geni builds one collaborative tree, while MyHeritage offers private trees, historical records, and DNA services.
How private is information on Geni?
Living profiles are private by default, and access is normally limited to profile managers, close family groups, curators, and Geni employees.
Users can control whether their own profile appears in public searches through the site’s privacy settings.
Profiles for deceased people may be public, and profiles for people born more than 150 years ago are expected to be public because many users share those ancestors.
A public profile can be viewed by anyone and may appear in search engines.
This model supports collaboration, but it is not ideal for someone who wants full control over every ancestral profile.
Before adding living relatives, users should ask permission and avoid posting private addresses, phone numbers, medical facts, or sensitive family stories.
How reliable is Geni’s information?
Geni should be treated as a research guide rather than final proof.
A large tree can reveal useful people and connections, but every important claim still needs a reliable source.
Strong profiles link facts to birth records, marriage records, census pages, church books, wills, newspapers, or cemetery records.
Geni’s source tools and duplicate merging can improve accuracy when careful researchers use them well.
Collaboration can also spread an error quickly when users copy a claim without checking its evidence.
The best habit is to examine each relationship one generation at a time and never trust a long path merely because the website displays it.
Who should use Geni.com?
Geni is a strong choice for people who enjoy teamwork, study distant ancestors, or want to connect their research with a large public tree.
It is especially useful when several relatives want to build one family history together.
The free account provides real value because it does not limit how many profiles you can add.
Pro makes more sense for active researchers who need broad search, frequent Tree Matches, large exports, and faster support.
People who want a private tree, exclusive editing control, or one subscription covering a huge record library may prefer another service.
Geni works best as a shared map of human relationships, while original records remain the proof behind that map.