I suppose like most of us, I am a little curious about my family history, but not enough to spend time or money researching it. That’s where Geni.com comes in.

Most of you probably know it, but just in case check it out. It’s a Wikipedia type site where members of your family fill in the genealogy tree. It’s only as good as the family memory, but that’s usually as good as it gets from an accuracy perspective.

The site is incredibly viral. I just filled in the name of a few relatives who are then invited to take a look at the tree and a few days later the tree had over 100 detailed entries.

I am not sure what business model they are going to implement, but as a user it’s a lot of fun to use and see your family tree grow with no effort.

  • Thank you for checking out our site–it’s great to know the efforts of our team are being appreciated. I’ve given you an email contact so feel free to use to contact us anytime.

    Reply

  • Yes, it’s incredible.
    I started my family tree 3 months ago, filling the information of my 30 direct relatives… and now I have more than 1100 members on the tree.
    In our tree we have also some pictures of my grand-grand-father. Awesome!

    Reply

  • It’s true, the websites is pretty addictive.

    But while completing the information about thinking about privacy and how old this information put all together for public access is so dangerous.

    Basically you know how valuable is to know who your father is, your son is. Remember this cases of “virtual kidnapping” happening in Argentina, when inmates called random people telling them that their son was kidnapped. And to release them they needed to buy 20 prepaid phone cards and tell them the number. They never said your last name, usually people got caught when asked “Clara?” “yes, clara” they said.

    Now they know all your family names and relationships.

    Scary, uh?

    Reply