I just signed up for a Geni Pro subscription after adding like 200 people to my tree. The people have matches, but their manager is someone I don't know. I've never merged before, is it something that I have to do or is it just an option? I don't want to annoy the managers of the other trees. Is merging the only Pro feature Geni has? Please help, I'm confused.
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Maven B. Helms It's completely optional. You may want to look over the prospective matches carefully to make sure they really are matches - Geni's matching algorithm is loosey-goosey and gives a lot of false positives. If there's anything you don't like, or not enough information, you can always "Remove Match".
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Jeff, Geni Curator The ultimate goal of Geni is to merge your tree and become part of the World Family Tree (http://www.geni.com/worldfamilytree). Geni is designed to be a collaborative website, with one profile for one person. If we have a common ancestor, it makes sense for us to pool our research, information, and sources, instead of duplicating each others work, wasting time and creating many trees. Such profiles that gain good sourcing become master profiles. The World Family Tree and merging is the primary draw to Geni, where you build to a point (your branch) and merge into the existing world tree. The main features of Pro are for the purpose of merging and collaboration, with some features, like seeing how your related to other people in the tree (famous, historical, or otherwise), only having significance after merging into a larger tree.
The bad side of merging is the nature of many people creating duplicate trees online, some not as up to date or accurate as others, with mistakes propagated as people copy other trees. Our goal is to remove that by only having one tree, but we still get some of these inconsistencies as people can merge in bad data from a tree they copied. Also, as Maven stated, it's important to be confident that the family / profile merges is the same profile / family (hoving over the names really helps this as the hovercard can show additional family connections). Sometimes we get incorrect merges, which we then have to fix. Overall, merging into another tree is usually a plus and without any issues (particularly if it's not too far back in history), but mistakes can happen, errors can be introduced, and you have to be willing to work through such situations if they arise. Such as, the profile and family are a match, but as you merge further up, you find that parents for one profile don't mach up - someone has incorrect data. While I'd like all matches to be identical, I don't see this as a bad situation - someone has the incorrect parents, so it is a great focus of verification, documentation, and notes. The profiles become the better for it as we more fully understand, source and lock in the correct data and resolve the parent conflict.
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