GENI is telling me that some relatives on my family tree 'match' people on other trees. This is enticing because it sounds like someone else's tree has an exact match for my relative, including date-of-birth and place-of-birth. But when I radically change both those variables to preposterous values (i.e., change the DOB by 100 years and change the place of birth to a different country) the notification of a tree match persists. How can this be so? Is GENI simply matching trees by members who have the same name? If that's the case, how reliable is the tree match? And why would I gamble money to merge these two trees when there is little certainty that the common name on the two trees really is the same person?
2 comments
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Jeff, Geni Curator Geni uses some caching when calculating matches, so changing the info might not remove the match right away. They use multiple factors to determine a match to include names, dates, family members. What the match is showing will depend on the type. Tree matches attempt to find duplicates within Geni, so that they can be merged into a single profile, growing the tree for collaboration. A Smart Match is a tree on MyHeritage, WikiTree, etc, which might contain additional information about that person or their family. If you send me a private message with a link to the profile, I can take a closer look and let you know. Jeff Gentes
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Yair Sageev Do you know if Geni uses the nicknames field for smart matching, record matching? I religiously fill these in with all the name variations I find, which is especially important when old names had no standard spelling (Freidl, Fridl, Freydl, Freyde, Frayda, etc).