Millions of Geni profiles now available on SuperSearch

Millions of Geni profiles now available on SuperSearch

We’re happy to announce that as of this week, you can search 138 million Geni profiles on MyHeritage’s SuperSearch.

Soon after acquiring Geni in November 2012, MyHeritage provided Geni’s users with Record Matches and Smart Matches powered by MyHeritage. We added this to enable Geni users to benefit from historical records – something that hadn’t been available on Geni before – and discover new relatives and ancestors through matches between their tree and the 25 million trees on MyHeritage.

This week we completed reciprocating this benefit for MyHeritage users, and now they are able to search Geni profiles on MyHeritage, and receive automatic matches between their family trees and Geni. It took us some time to add this, because we implemented a robust, real-time “bridge” that constantly updates MyHeritage SuperSearch as changes are made in the tree on Geni. The updates stream to MyHeritage every second but SuperSearch is updated in bulk once a day with all the changes. This prevents information on MyHeritage that originates from Geni from ever becoming out of date.

Now that the Geni profiles are available on SuperSearch, MyHeritage users will start receiving matches with Geni trees. This is a great benefit for users of either service, as both will now be able to expand their trees, find new information, discover new cousins and learn more from each other.

Search the Geni World Family Tree collection on SuperSearch now

This is a good opportunity to explain the different models by which MyHeritage and Geni operate. MyHeritage is a giant forest of private family trees. On MyHeritage, nobody can edit your tree except you and the people you choose. Whereas Geni has created a highly collaborative system that resembles Wikipedia, called the World Family Tree. On Geni, other users can edit your tree and public profiles and often do so, in an attempt to create one family tree of the world. These are very different approaches and users can decide which approach is more appropriate for them for their family history. MyHeritage offers stronger control and tighter privacy, but has data duplication. On Geni there is very little duplication, and more collaboration, but less control. That’s why Geni is blessed to have an active community of curators, who are power users that help other users collaborate on the World Family Tree and work hard to ensure the accuracy of the tree. Many genealogists don’t like the notion of other people changing their data, and prefer MyHeritage, while others are passionate about the World Family Tree concept and prefer Geni. The good news is that, regardless of their preference, users on either site can now benefit from the work done by genealogists on the other site!

If a Geni user exported his/her tree to MyHeritage, there will obviously be plenty of matches between that tree on MyHeritage and Geni (whence that tree came) and these matches are not helpful. In fact, they create noise which makes it more difficult to see other matches that are useful. For such an exported tree, the user should remove the check mark from the option: “Enable Smart Matching™ with other MyHeritage websites and partners”. This option is available on MyHeritage in the family site settings, under “my privacy”. When that check mark is removed, Geni will not receive matches with that MyHeritage tree, and also the opposite will take place and that tree on MyHeritage will not receive matches with Geni.

If you are a MyHeritage user and receive a Geni tree match, you can save the new information discovered to your tree on MyHeritage, and link to the Geni profile. You can also contact the user on Geni who submitted that profile, to exchange information. Geni users have been enjoying matches from MyHeritage for a while and have already created many links between profiles on both sites. However, as per MyHeritage’s model, changes made on Geni do not modify anything on a MyHeritage tree unless its owner chooses to make a change herself/himself.

As always, our privacy policy is strictly enforced, and information on living people from Geni is not disclosed on MyHeritage. Registered Geni members are searchable by their full name (as they are on Geni), but no additional information is given about them and no information is provided about living family members. The only exception is public master profiles on Geni, which are typically celebrities, just like Wikipedia pages on famous people. These profiles are public on Geni and are therefore public on MyHeritage too.

Example Geni profile on MyHeritage SuperSearch

Example Geni profile on MyHeritage SuperSearch

There are now 138 million Geni profiles searchable on SuperSearch – and with the exception of Geni, many of these are not available anywhere else on the internet. This is another great reason to use MyHeritage.

Geni also has a large collection of meticulously curated celebrity profiles, with extremely well documented family trees of those celebrities. Now that this information is also available on MyHeritage, who knows which celebrities you’ll discover are related to you!

Enjoy,
The team at MyHeritage

Comments

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  • Ashley Odell

    January 30, 2014

    Thank you for this post! As a Geni Curator, I look forward to working more with MyHeritage users and helping you with any questions and concerns as they arise. Please feel free to make a Geni account and use our discussions area (geni.com/discussions) if you have anything you’d like assistance with regarding this feature.

    We hope you’ll see the great benefits of a collaborative tree, with many people pooling research together to break down walls more effectively, and become active on both sites!

  • garry gosney

    January 30, 2014

    cool always looking for new family members to add to my family tree

  • Eve

    January 30, 2014

    I did not understand clearly. Is this matching of records between your 2 systém for free for your paid Premium users or is it a part of additionally paid Supersearch service?

    • E

      Esther

      February 4, 2014

      Hi Eve,

      We have two different types of subscriptions here at MyHeritage:

      A family site subscription (Premium or PremiumPlus) entitles you to increased storage on your family site for people in the family tree, photos, videos and documents.
      Family site subscriptions allow you access to fun and amazing features like the Timeline and Timebook. You get priority support and you can use the Premium features in our family tree software, Family Tree Builder.
      If you have a Premium or PremiumPlus family site subscription you can also access the MyHeritage collections in SuperSearch (other collections may require a data subscription).
      A data subscription entitles you to view the records in the paid collections in SuperSearch. You also get unlimited access to Record Matches, including confirming and rejecting matches, if you have a family tree on MyHeritage.com.

  • Terry Jackson

    January 30, 2014

    As another Geni curator, I would like to echo Ashley’s post above and welcome MH users to the Geni tree. I hope they’ll soon learn that more eyes to spot errors in a tree is a good thing and in the end can lead to more accuracy. What hasn’t been mentioned is the feature of Projects on Geni. They are another way of approaching history grouping people with something in common for example the ‘Titanic’ project which gathered together all the people that were on the Titanic and researched their trees.
    Looking forward to helping MH members soon.

  • Caroline Anderson

    January 30, 2014

    How come you have to pay to get the information? Should it not be included in the membership fee?

    • E

      Esther

      February 3, 2014

      Hi Caroline,

      MyHeritage data subscriptions provide unlimited access to all historical records (including this new collection), and Record Matches. Read more about our annual subscription here: .

      Esther / MyHeritage Team

  • Jean Niesen

    January 31, 2014

    Looking for a copy of a will for Samuel Clark Benjamin born 1749 died 1824 will probated Dec 1824 in Addyston county , Vermont I need to link him to his son Samuel Clark Benjamin Jr