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Tree matching: what's really being matched?

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?

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