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Please respond re: merge of Geni and MyHeritage

Rachel Spigel Goodman

December 13, 2013 10:11

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I think that there should be an option for a Geni Pro subscription with a MyHeritage data access at a discount. It is very complicated, expensive etc. right now because these are still acting as two separate entities. Yet, all the information comes up on the Geni site as Matches. I find it very uncomfortable to have to spend so much money to get data from MyHeritage and buy a Geni Pro which does not include access to the very data that is being shown on my Geni tree as a data match. Kindly address this for me and for your other Geni users. Withoout a Pro Membership I do not even see a Contact Me feature to discuss this with you.

Thank you.

Rgoodman108@gmail.com

22 comments

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  Erik van Luxzenburg January 08, 2014 13:14

  I have the same issue, I have a Geni Pro account and every time I want to add a MyHeritage match I am requested to upgrade my (still separate) MyHeritage account with a Data-plan for more than €108.78, whilst I already paid €43.55 for Geni Pro. I would say I should only pay for the difference between these two ammounts: €65,23

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  PATRICK WILLIAM O'TOOLE January 16, 2014 00:56

  It appears that I will need to make a choice between Geni Pro or My Heritage.  Paying for both is out of the question for me.  I have to decide which would be the better choice.

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  Carolynn Davis February 17, 2014 21:30

  it would appear I am not the only one that is frustrated with finding information about family, then learning one is unable to view do to it being on my heritage. I have  the Geni Pro account but am unable to view unless I pay more money. it seems this has been an issue for quite a while, therefore it has been addressed and not clarified or what.. please let us know what the next step should be.. also the link to report a bug or issue is not "setup" as yet, is this because I am working on the laptop?

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  Rachel Spigel Goodman February 19, 2014 16:25

  Carolynn, just letting you know that no one has got back to me about this and I left my email for them to do so. On Pro, do you have a Contact Me link so that we could contact Geni personnel directly? You can write to me on my email if you want.

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  Judson Ronald Rhodes August 30, 2014 18:22

  I too have a Geni Pro account - which is good until July of 2016 - and I cannot access similar information on MyHeritage with paying an additional $9.95/month (billed annually at $~120.00)! People have been asking Geni about this for over a year (since Geni "joined" the MyHeritage family in November of 2012: "We’re happy to announce some exciting news for our community: Geni is joining the MyHeritage family! Geni will continue as a separate product, focused on collaborative genealogy, but with some great new resources and features we’ll be rolling out to users in the coming months.") and still no response from you to the Geni members above who have taken the time to inquire. Why bother to entice us with so-called "Smart Matches" that we can't see unless it's simply a ploy to extract more money from existing members and thus enhance your cash flow? This genealogy business has proven to be very popular and I suspect quite lucrative, but at the same time I know several people that won't get involved because of the costs of getting at our family history information. And now you see members being put in a position to have to decide between the two products. It seems that fairness to your subscribers should be a guiding factor in your business decisions, and your production of "Smart Matches" that contain useful information that many of us don't have - unless we pay you more money - smacks of extortion. If you want to grow and keep your subscribers satisfied, feeling fairly treated and not tempted to jump to Ancestry.com, then I suggest you step up to the plate and give us a more reasonable (economically feasible) way to access all of the Geni/MyHeritage genealogy databases. Your speedy response is kindly requested.

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  Wendy Patricia Pardy August 30, 2014 20:37

  I am in agreement with everything everyone else has said re the merger between Geni and My Heritage. As I cannot access anyone through 'smart matches' without paying another subscription to My Heritage I cannot see any point to my Geni Pro membership. I really feel that I joined Geni Pro under misrepresentation as I was lead to believe I could contact other members.
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  Charlene Marie Truxler September 09, 2015 05:40

  I will not pay for both companies. I paid for a premium account on Geni thinking since everything you look at on Geni takes you to My Heritage that if I paid at Geni I could at the very least, upload my GED file the I saved on my computer from my free My Heritage account. Now every time I click to verify a file I get told I must buy a premium account from My Heritage. If that is the case, I choose neither company! I will save up money and get an account at ancestry.com.  They may not be reasonable on price, but at least you know who your paying and the services you will actually get when you pay. I expect an answer and a fix for this problem quickly. I am sure most will agree when I say that customer shifting without any services as advertised for payment is fraud and as such illegal.  As for me, I will be watching closely for a resolve for Geni's customers.

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  Gary Oliver February 05, 2017 02:11

  Late to this conversation, but it is very irritating that I get emails advising matches, but when I click, My Heritage want me to pay.  What's the use of Geni Pro?  I'm paid for the year, so I have time to shop for something that isn't related to these two companies. 

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  Wendy Patricia Pardy February 05, 2017 06:01

  Because of this problem I have since cancelled my Genie Pro subscription.  It really is too frustrating to be informed of links and not be able to make contact.

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  Sandy Scherger September 06, 2017 17:02

  All these years later in 2017 I see the problem has not changed or even been addressed! I agree with everything above - I signed for Geni Pro believing I could then access MyHeritage but l;ike all of these above I can't do that without paying. I'm a pensioner - I had enough trouble trying to find spare money to pay for Geni Pro!! If Geni and MyHeritage are now under the same umbrella why can't we have access to both on some sort of paid subscription. I'm not griping about paying just griping about the double dipping and having to pay twice!! It's ridiculous and very unfair on us who signed up in good faith for a Pro account

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  Odd-Wiking Rahlff December 09, 2017 05:24

   Quite disturbing and shocking ignorance of Geni to not even bother to address these important questions all these years. 

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  Ronald Lawrence Cohen March 07, 2019 16:25

  This is nuts. I spend money for Geni Pro but always get sent over to My Heritage. If this is constant, as many others are indicating, then I'm wasting my time with Geni and should get a refund. Someone at GENI should respond and explain AND get it fixed.

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  Jim Henderson March 07, 2019 23:17

  The benefit of having a Pro account at Geni is that it is a Whole World Tree. You can work your way back to a relative who is in the tree already, as I did with my g-grandmother, Adelaide Sturt Henderson (Morphett), and when I added a profile for her, a blue marker popped up, showing that there was already a profile in the Whole World Tree for her. I looked at her relatives, and they matched what I knew, so I made a request to merge my new profile with the existing one. The other manager looked at what I had done and agreed to the merge. My independent work became a branch in the Whole World Tree. Now I have access to all those Morphetts without doing any work at all.

  The problem with adding your discoveries to a tree in My Heritage or Ancestry is that it just remains your tree, and there is no easy way to merge your work with that of others.

  Geni provides peer review of our discoveries, because other managers of the same profiles are able to bring other information to bear, and lead to more accurate information about our ancestors.

  Geni was bought by My Heritage, and as others have said, they run as separate companies in some ways, and both companies charge what the market will bear. For a Geni user, you don't need a full account at MyHeritage, just a Data subscription, to get access to the documents that MyHeritage pays people to scan and upload. The current cost is US$159 p.a. It costs money to keep servers running, and to add new scanned records.

  If you don't want to pay to be part of the Whole World Tree, but just want to put your personal relatives there and invite your cousins to cooperate, then you would probably do better moving your relatives to Ancestry, as they have far more scanned records available than are at MyHeritage. (Just download a GEDCOM file from Geni and upload it at Ancestry.)

  If you do want the benefits of being part of a Whole World Tree, I suggest WikiTree, which is free. Again, you can upload a GEDCOM file there, and merge it into the Whole World Tree in stages. (I find it a bit cumbersome to edit there, though, and that's why I moved to Geni.) For scanned data, you could rely on FamilySearch, provided free of charge by the Mormons.

  I don't work for Geni -- just an ordinary user. I hope these thoughts help in the discussion.

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  Paul W Spillenger March 17, 2019 13:40

  Jim Henderson's points are reasonable and well-taken, but the fact remains that the working relationship between Geni and My Heritage is so murky and confusing that one could be forgiven for wondering if it was intentional.  If I am going to be regularly informed that there are "matches" for a person, given a taste of what those might be, but then told I have to pay more than US$100 to get the full info., then we're veering pretty close to a classic bait-and-switch.  You would think that a subscription to Geni Pro would entitle one to some kind of discount on the service that is constantly being hawked.  If this is out of the question, then there should be some way (in Settings, perhaps) of turning off these "match" flags, because for those of us who for reasons of practicality and principle don't want to pay another hefty sum for My Heritage, they are useless and distracting.

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  Bjørn P. Brox March 17, 2019 16:52

  To avoid hitting the paywall you should never click on a confirmed or green or brown match,- only the blue ones.

   

   

   

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  Anton 'Tony' John Grambihler March 17, 2019 19:54

  I have found more matches on Ancestry than MyHeritage.

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  Jim Henderson March 18, 2019 00:59

  Ah, but as Paul Spillinger said, the MyHeritage ones are dangled before us all the time, whereas we have to do a search at Ancestry for a particular person, and then to see the results you need an account at Ancestry :-(

  (You can get a free account at Ancestry for two weeks, but then you have to cancel it promptly to avoid the charge on your credit card.)

  Or you could pay for 6 months at Ancestry, search for known relatives there and then use SmartCopy to copy a family at a time into the Whole World Tree at Geni. Then cancel the Ancestry account before the 6 months are up.

   

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  Trudy-Ann Kroon January 05, 2020 08:50

  I just refused to renew myheritage subscription, because at $384 I couldn't justify the expense. I started on Geni, before I realized they had just been acquired by MH, so not happy that to make full use of Geni, I have to buy a data pack on MH.  Isn't that  a conflict of interests. You can't say Buy Geni Pro and you can expand your tree, but oh by the way, if you want info from their sister company you have to pay extra for that. That just isn't right, it's a rort. I could understand if the two companies weren't linked, but they are, so there is no excuse  for such a shady practice.

  And so you know, if you don't put a stop on an auto payment every year, they will just take the money, even if you think you had a stop in place on it the previous year. I was not happy that they had cleared out my account just after xmas, it took 2 days to come out and 6 days to come back, I was furious and their supposed 24/7 354 day a year help line wasn't being answered. 

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  Lois Olley June 29, 2020 21:08

  Today it is June 29 2020 and I still don't see any response from Geni on this board.  I only just signed up for Geni Pro and ran into thesame problem. I paid through Paypal and I can cancel the purchase easily. Which I am going to do in next 5 minutes and go back to Basic.

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  Bjørn P. Brox June 29, 2020 21:48

  There is absolute no reason to pay for both Geni and MyHeritage if you do your own research, something everyone should do and not peek into other sites like MyHeritage to see others trees. MyHeritage profiles is not and should not be used as sources..
  
  Most Geni users even manage fine with the free version of Geni by collaborating with others working on the same lines.
  
  As I said above: Do not click on a confirmed or green or brown match,- only the blue ones. No need for that if you do your own research.

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  Lois Olley June 29, 2020 22:23

  You cannot assume what my uses for Pro account is. I am an advanced genealogist and have been researching for 20 years. I agree I do not need both Geni and MyHeritage to do my research and have not used Geni in particular for several years until I found my living relatives posting their Ukrainian language tree there.

  I am aware of the importance of collecting certificates and government records and also aware that many people are just copying whatever they find instead of confirming validity before they add to their trees. I was the same way in the beginning until I learned to do better.,.

  You might be okay with looking for your information in USA records but I am not. I have to find things in Great Britain, France, Scandinavia, and Slavic nations.

   

   

   

   

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  Anton 'Tony' John Grambihler June 29, 2020 23:48

  I joined Geni after a relative got me interested. I became a lifetime PRO. That was taken away when Geni was taken over by another company. The PROs lifetime membership was demoted to a 10(?) year membership.

  Also there was no limit on the size of the GEDCOM that was downloaded. This was extreme, but better than today's limit.

  I do not recall why I joined MyHeritage, but I deleted all my MyHeritage Family History and added back I, my Wife and our parents. I now use it to collect relatives from matches MyHeritage notifies me of. The plan is to eventually compare them with my known information and add any that I can verify.