GeniReviews 78

I am not a member of Geni, and given the huge volume of complaints about this co., I am very pleased not to have joined. For one thing, I would never join anything which does not provide its members (aka customers) with any contact info. No phone #, no email address. That is very suspicious right out of the box - and must be extremely frustrating after you run into a problem and have no way to address it.

I had never heard of Geni.com until today, when I googled a man who is a public figure, and who I know to be alive. In the list of google leads there was one for Geni.com.
I opened it, thinking I might find the piece of info for which I was looking - his exact birthdate. What I found was a short page saying he is dead (he's not), and that his birth date was somewhere between 1915 and 1975. Really? That's a 60 year window! I don't know the day and month of his birthday, but I do know that as of February 2015 he was 69 - so his birth YEAR was either 1946 or 1945. That's a much smaller window than the 60 year range the Geni.com page gives for his birth.
And it said he was dead but that the date of his death is unknown. Probably because he's alive!

This man is Charlie Soap, the widower of Wilma Mankiller, who was the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She passed away in 2010 from cancer, and her husband is now campaigning to become chief. And by NOW I mean there are new posts today on the Facebook page supporting his election - 'the friends of Charlie Soap'. The election is on June 27,2015 - just 12 days from now.

I know the Geni page was for him and not someone else named Charlie Soap, because it says he was the husband of Wilma Mankiller. She was well known enough for President Obama to speak about her when she died. There is also a Wikipedia page with her entire history, including birth and death dates. She was a public figure. HER HUSBAND IS A PUBLIC FIGURE - so it is not difficult to find accurate information about him. And for the record, he is 69 y/o and appears to be in excellent health. Geni.com's page stating that he is dead is so inaccurate as to be ridiculous.
Does anyone at Geni.com do ANY fact checking? Maybe you need to start!
It seems like putting such inaccurate info out there about a man who is running for the most powerful position in the Cherokee Nation (or about anyone, for that matter) could get your company into legal difficulties.
At the very least, correct that page. And I would like to suggest you send Mr. Soap a personal apology - for 'killing him off' while he's still very much alive. I also suggest that all information should be verified before being printed - about anyone.

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.

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.

The information published on this site is wrong and suspected of participating in SCAMS that targets SENIOR CITIZENS. Attempts to contact the web admin were impossible.

I entered geni.com in good faith posting my children's childhood pictures, graduations to date and so on.
Since this time, I have been locked out of my free account, with a message
'You do not have permission to view this page.' when I try to reset my password.
Although I have advised GENI on many occasions now, at their email address of *******@geni.com, I am still locked.
They have allowed me to join again, but I cannot seem to link to any family unless a pay a subscription fee. Yes, it says its free, but it asks for credit card details.
Has this happened to anyone else?

Geni doesn't accept any critical comment about the site, the customer-service or the management. Geni has in that regard the mentality of North Korea! Every free user, paying user and even any curator who publishes negative comments will be suspended and indefinitely blocked from working on Geni!

Geni is a site for hints and pointers, but not usable as a base for the results of your own research!
If you want to use Geni you have to keep your research results on your own computer's hard-disk and copy between it and Geni, that's the only way to keep your results in good condition, because on Geni you're never sure that other users will not change, delete or ruin your data!
Every day thousands of users add incorrect information and relations, after being sent daily hints with profiles and trees from MyHeritage. Any madman can make his own tree on MyHeritage and many do, unfortunately are there many people who fantasize ancestors to look important and all this $#*! Is copied to Geni!

There are no instructions on how to work on the site, even the curators who work voluntarily to improve Geni don't know how everything works.
Geni for a long time suffered from very bad management and customer service for basic users. Now there is a new CEO, who is an excellent software engineer, but lacking competent support he isn't able to improve the Geni site in line with the quality of other genealogy sites. Customer service generally is now worse than it ever was.
As free basic user there are too many limitations and too many pop ups with requests to upgrade to become a paying user.
The search tool is very weak and is annoying with continuous request pop-ups to upgrade, it is easier to search via Google with adding "site: Geni.com" than to search as a Geni user!
For a collaboration site there are too many private limitations and too many duplicates making it very difficult and annoying working when at every step you have a pop up extorting you to upgrade to paying membership.

Biggest Pro's: More than 70,000,000 by blood-relation or marriage with another connected profiles, dynamic tree-view, some kind of a relation-path/lineage counting, multilingual, social and research forum for users, project-collaboration.
Biggest Con: Unreliable profiles, missing or wrong sources for the data and relations, easy vandalism that can ruin your inputs, poor software for projects editing, poor search-engine, bad profile displays, no gedcom uploads, limited and bad gedcom downloads.

I first joined geni.com with a Pro membership paid monthly but they charged for a full year up front. After much complaining, they agreed to 3 months which is the length of time I wanted to use it as a trial. This was in 2011. I'll try to keep this simple.
PROS
-Great help as far as interacting with other family researchers and references to other web sites for documents.
-If you hit a block, you can see what others have but DO NOT add to your tree until you've checked the source! It was helpful to me when the family moved and someone else had the name of the city and country of where they came from. I searched that city and found some documents.
CONS
-No quality control. NONE! You can put whatever you want on that tree. Someone else had entered a family member's information incorrectly and when I brought it to their attention they were reluctant to change it. I told them that I knew this person in life and even had documents. They didn't want to see documents. After much discussion and e-mailing that person's moderator, they changed it (but I could have been lying; they didn't check)
-When I joined, you could not upload trees in any format (such as gedcom). I had to enter each person individually.
-Not user friendly. Difficult to navigate.
-Married women appear with their married name with maiden name in parenthesis. This was a bit confusing and different than most genealogy programs.
-If you try to delete information, it pops right back. When I asked about this I was told "a distant relative put that information up after I took it down." The moderator name was listed and when I followed their line, they were not related.
The moderator of a person on the tree is first person to add it. I may be more closely related but the first one to enter has complete control. If 2 people should be merged, it is up to the moderator to determine what information stays attached to that person or what is deleted.
I have discontinued my paid membership but stay on their e-mail list just so I can see what they have on my family.
If you see their advertising, the focus is on creating the largest tree, not the most accurate. Sad because the concept is good.

This website uses deceptive practice to get you to enter information. They then attempt to wrest control of the information from you. If you complain as i di, they suspend your account, and then use your own account to delete the complaints you made, thus giving the appearance you yourself deleted them, as if they were resolved. They then refuse to return or delete any information you have added such as personal family photos, and documents, and give your account to one of their stooges who now controls not only all the branches of the tree you may have laboriously added, but also your private and personal information. Beware of this outift! I received a request to merge, complained about its deceptive nature, one day later exactly not only had my account suspended as retaliation for complaining, but my account is now being used by someone i don't know to manage private family material. These people are the worst sort, avoid them at all costs and by all means google them before you join.

They are misleading & lying to people to get them to add their info. They don't tell you that you're required to merge duplicates with total strangers who may or may not be family & that once you do you not only lose all control over your tree... you also can't delete it. They banned me from my own tree, deleted my account against my wishes & turned what I managed over to a person from another country nobody in our family knows. They're thieves. Do not add your info here.