Geni in a bottle

At the prodding of a friend I’ve started trying out Geni again, and it’s definitely starting to grow on me. (It’s sort of like Facebook but for genealogy.) I’m not completely sold on it yet, but I’m willing to give it a good, solid chance now — so I’m starting to enter in all my data (by hand not because I don’t want to use the GEDCOM import but because I want to get more familiar with my family tree), invite my immediate family, and see what’s still missing.

The notable thing for me so far, as I’ve mentioned several times on my Beyond blog, is an area to make research notes. Most genealogy apps are geared more towards recording only your final conclusions, not the steps you took to get there. (They do have sources, yes, but again, that’s for the final conclusion, really. And little textboxes for typing in your reasoning don’t quite cut it for me.)

Right now I’m thinking I’ll end up using a personal wiki and/or a plain old notebook for research notes, then put my conclusions into Geni. And I’ll export to GEDCOM when I need to submit names to the temple. We’ll see how it goes.

At any rate, the thing that matters is doing more genealogy. It’s important, and yet I’ve hardly done anything at all for the past couple of years. (This coming from a former family history major, no less.) Tonight I realized that my priorities need to be shifted a bit, and family history is what I need to be making more time for. And so I shall.

I had an unsavory experience with Geni when I used it some time ago (a year, I think). I added email addresses for some of my living relatives, and as I recall it automatically spammed them to join Geni.

I could be misremembering, so even if we give it the benefit of the doubt that it asked permission somewhere to email people whose addresses I put it, the truly unacceptable part was that if they didn’t sign up, it kept emailing them once a week with a new invitation. In my name.

Is that still the case, do you know? Are there tools to control outgoing invitations/emails more strictly, perchance? I understand the pressure startups are under to add users, but acting like Shelfari is the wrong way to go about it. Shady.

Ben, I am not a genealogy expert, but thanks to Heather and her job as a genealogist for Sorensen Molecular Genealogy Foundation I seem to hear about all the online genealogy applications out there on a regular basis. I’ve come to the conclusion that most genealogical applications are as effective as the user knows how to make them. There are people out there who are only interested in birth, marriage and death dates, so that is what they aim for. I don’t think it is fair to blame an application because the user didn’t use it to its fullest potential. That said I lean towards whatever Heather’s genealogical preference is.

In this case, she has decided to stick with PAF for a few reasons. First off, PAF is as close to a universal genealogy program as I think we are going to get. That is why most professional genealogists and genealogy companies use it. She uses it at her work everyday.

There are many very old people who love genealogy, but not necessarily the internet, PAF seems to be a safe and effective medium for them to use to share information with each other.

Beyond this Heather likes the media options and notes section available on PAF. There are a few people in my family who seem to do most of the research, but Heather tends to assign the rest of us tasks, such as scanning images and transcribing old diaries and family histories. PAF allows you to link images to people in your file. Not only can you put in pictures of people, but you can scan copies of documents (family bible, census records, marriage records, and so on).

Although there is only a small section for typing information in the sources each individual has a notes section where you can put anything. I know Heather has more than 20 pages of notes for quite a few people in her PAF files containing their complete missionary journal, photos and etc. She types out her research log, findings and what she wants to look at next. Then she includes everything she has found for a person (obituaries, wills, land records, newspaper clippings, diaries, entries in church records, census information, etc.). She does this at her work also. This allows the next person who looks at the PAF file to know everything that she knew when she submitted the file.

Genealogy need not be expensive to be inclusive and PAF is an excellent free program to use, especially when used to its fullest potential.

Oh, I forgot to mention one more thing about PAF (and I know I’m starting to sound like an advertisement :D).

Each person has an option button. One of the options is add a new event/attribute. There are more than 40 event options that you can add to a person’s main file. You can add information about military service, immigration, naturalization, occupations, hospitalization, adoption and so on.

But regardless of the software, I do agree that family history should be personal. It’s about getting to know your ancestors. Heather is currently developing a website devoted to teaching people (families, and children) how to to do research and how to fully utilize the free software programs and online resources that are available. I’ll let you know when it is up and running if you’re interested.

Good luck with your family history.

Oh, I love PAF. But it doesn’t run on Macs and you can’t easily share your work with your family members. (Emailing PAF files back and forth just doesn’t cut it, I’m sorry.) Seeing as I’m on a Mac and my family’s on a Mac (and more and more people are these days), and I want to easily collaborate with my family over the Internet, I’m afraid PAF isn’t an option.

rikker: I’m not sure. It did send invitations to my family members when I added their e-mail addresses as part of their profiles, which I didn’t quite expect, but since I was only adding my immediate family, I was okay with that.

That said, I haven’t touched Geni since I blogged about it, and I’m not sure why.

Ben,

I hadn’t considered the Mac issue. We have both a Mac and two PC’s at our house. You can’t beat Macs for graphic design, but you are right there are software limitations unless your install and run windows on your Mac.

Macs don’t just do graphic design, you know. :) And installing Windows on your Mac is less than ideal — I mean, it works, yes, but you have to buy Windows (expensive!), and you don’t get the nice Mac experience. Therefore I don’t do things that way.