Adam & Amber’s Blog

My Dad is really into genealogy, he has a pretty decent family tree put together of our family. He did it all the old fashioned way; starting with paper, pen, official records, and memories. While I admire the amount of work he put into it, I know that I could never spend so much time putting something like that together. That is the beauty of the Internet, it allows people to easily collect distributed knowledge in one place for the benefit of everyone. It is in that spirit I introduce you to Geni, a genealogy website setup like a social network. You define your own profile and tree, you invite family members to your tree and they can add in details about themselves as well as more people into the tree. It is secured so that only people in your tree can see information about you (or even that you are on the site at all) which is a benefit over just posting your family tree online for the world to see.

I have played with the website some (creating a family tree, more like a family stump at this point) and the interface is very clean, simple, and intuitive (all things I like in a website). It is a free service that is currently in beta (sounds like it will be an ad-supported site). I suggest giving it a try, at least build the tree out far enough to reach that ambitious person who will fill in the rest for you. That is what I did, it is just me and Dad

You can find more info about it on the Geni Blog (I think it is cool to see a blog on a site that is starting out like this, if I ever make a commercially viable web product I would do this).