This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah-based Ancestry.com, with 900,000 subscribers the reigning king of commercial Internet genealogy services, welcomes Geni.com and a spate of other online family history newcomers to its world.
"For years, we were the only ones driving growth in this category," said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Generations, which owns Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and related sites.
"So when we see Geni or any number of new genealogy upstarts, we're thrilled," Sullivan said.
Sullivan maintains that once someone gets interested on online family study, "they eventually will make their way to Ancestry.com" and its 23,000 online databases of births, deaths, baptisms, military service, censuses and more.
The 9-year-old Ancestry.com family also offers a number of free services to Web visitors, among them its One World Tree.
More than 1 million user-generated pedigrees have been uploaded to Ancestry.com in the past month, and 170 million names and 500,000 photos have been added to online records over the past six months.
"People can go to Ancestry.com and build family trees, invite their family members to upload photos and precious stories and documents - and all of those experiences are free," Sullivan added.
From the beginning, the Internet has attracted people seeking to research their family trees - and sites wanting to make money off their pursuits. The Web's search capabilities seemed custom-tailored for sorting through long-forgotten records that are now being dusted off and digitized. Hundreds of sites sprang up.
In practice, though, Web genealogy has led to a lot of frustrated consumers - the process has been expensive (most sites charge fairly steep subscription fees) and time-consuming.
Now, sites are aiming to eliminate some of those drawbacks. One new entrant, Geni.com, which was launched last month by a former PayPal executive, offers a new model, based on connecting living relatives free of charge. The site is part genealogy, part six degrees of separation. Instead of paying a fee to research family records buried in archives, it asks users to build their own family trees - using the knowledge of living relatives - that eventually will merge into one giant family tree for the world. That is the hope anyway.
Geni.com is taking some of the elements of popular so-called social-networking and user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and MySpaceÂ. It went live in mid-January and has registered more than 100,000 users since then. It has done no traditional marketing yet, but blogs such as Digg (where users submit news stories) and Tech Crunch (which focuses on technology) passed the word. The site is free. Rather than charging fees, Geni plans on selling advertising and also plans to generate revenue by creating ''premium'' accounts and selling products, such as posters or coffee-table books of the family trees.
But Geni has already courted controversy - and raised privacy concerns. Several blog posts have expressed frustration with the level of personal information that can be published about a person, even without their permission. For example, a Geni member can create entire profiles for relatives who don't visit the site, including their birth dates, education, phone number and photos. Some of the identifying pieces of information used by many financial institutions - such as mother's maiden name and birth date - are often listed on the site.
To address those concerns, Geni is only allowing visitors to the site to see their own family trees. Geni says that family members are responsible for ensuring that the profile information is correct. (Popular sites such as MySpace rely primarily on similar modes of self-policing.) The company says it doesn't plan to sell the data to marketers. It also says it will introduce more privacy features as the site grows.
Ben Guthro, a 27-year-old software engineer from Boston, started building a family tree on Geni.com after he saw a post on Digg. His tree now has 250 members, some of whom he has never met before, such as his mother's cousin who lives in California. ''It spreads fast,'' he says.
Geni.com works like this. Users enter their first and last name, e-mail address and gender. A box then pops onto the screen, pink for women and blue for men, where members can add a picture, then fill personal information into a profile. Members then create their family tree by entering the names and e-mail addresses of their family members. Those relatives receive an e-mail from Geni asking them to join the network and help build the tree by inviting more relatives and creating profiles for ancestors. As family trees start to overlap, Geni.com plans to link similar branches together to create one giant family tree where members can track their ancestry and see their distant relations living throughout the world. Right now, Geni doesn't offer access to any databases or other research sources.
Members also are using Geni to stay in touch with living family members through sharing pictures and sending messages. Geni hosts more than 1 million profiles, with average users adding 10 people to their trees. Ana Greene, a 28 year-old from Arlington, Va., is planning a wedding and intends to post pictures from the event on the site.
Micheal LeVine, a 66-year-old research physicist from Port Jefferson, N.Y., says that after his nephew invited him to join Geni, he continues to unearth new family connections. ''I found relatives I didn't remember I was related to. I went to visit somebody's goat farm when I was 7, and all of a sudden, their name pops up,'' says LeVine, who finds that he visits the site several times a day to check if his family members have responded to his invitation. During a coming business trip to Chicago, he plans to meet up with a cousin from his mother's side, a woman in her early 90s who is a concentration-camp survivor.
Family tree sites are attracting a young, more global audience than some similar sites: more than half of Geni's traffic comes from outside the U.S. Indeed, a problem with the traditional sites is that they worked better for families which had come to America generations ago and less well with more recent immigrants. Meanwhile, the Generations Network also is developing internationally, launching sites in Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, China and Italy.
But, some users worry that Geni is too wide-open. ''This collaboration thing has some dangers,'' says LeVine. ''I invite people, they can invite people . . . and they have the same privileges as I do to erase names or change things. All you need is someone who is careless or malicious, and all your work goes down the drain.''