I am working on some Geni projects where I am researching families not yet connected to mine. As I gather information, I will be building a new and separate tree for them. While I have looked to try to determine if anyone already has these profiles on Geni, what happens if I miss one because of a spelling, etc. and 2 of the same profiles are then on Geni? Does it cause a problem? Does it let me know so that I can merge records or just add my entries to that manager's tree instead?
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Jim Henderson Seems to me the way to go is always to merge, provided you can demonstrate that the two profiles really do represent the same person.
At Ancestry, MyHeritage and so on, people have their own trees, but at Geni we don't talk about "your tree" and "my tree", because we are all working on the same tree for the whole world. There can be times when my branch and your branch are separate, but the goal is always to merge them.
Geni will help you with a blue flag, pointing to a "tree match". Then you check the relatives, and if it seems that two separate profiles clearly represent the same person, then send a message to the manager of the other profile, requesting a merge. If the spellings are different, see if you can find a birth or death certificate to shed light, and upload a scan of it to your documents and cite it in the profiles that it mentions. Then discuss the difference in spelling with the other manager.
Only one spelling can be listed in Name field of the database, but the other spelling can be in the Display Name field or in the Also Known As field. You can also write a sentence in the About section of the Overview tab to explain where the different spellings are used.
You often find that there are merge candidates in different generations, and the advice from Geni is to merge the people in the youngest generation first, and then work back to the more distant ancestors.
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Karen Schneider Jim, can't thank you enough for such a clear and yet thorough answer. Exactly what I've been searching for. You've covered all the bases plus some I didn't even know I needed to ask about. Appreciate the time you gave to my question. I've printed this out for reference and to share with others.
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Jim Henderson There is a very good "project" at geni that lists lots and lots of help pages:
https://www.geni.com/projects/A-to-Z-of-Help-Topics/38243That link and some of the most helpful links were sent to me by a volunteer Curator, June Barnes, and part of her letter is in my family tree help site at
https://sites.google.com/site/jimhfamilytreehelp/internet-storage-and-display/Whole-world-tree/geni-howto-pagesI hope you find those helpful also.
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Karen Schneider Thanks again, Jim. I just created desktop shortcuts to both!
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