It's August, 2018 and I see no updates to the ability to upload gedcom files. I have Safari browser and according to your help section does not support your "smart copy" extension. I use Family Tree Maker connected to a free version of ancestry.com. Short of finding your "word trees", why should I pay $119 a year if I have to restart my whole tree of 678 people?
16 comments
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Harold (Hal) Franklin Swift I have thousands of people in my family tree and there is no way I am going to reenter all those people into a new site either. But if I could I would upload my gedcom file.
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Lou Angelo I also have a large family tree and would like to use this site, but am not adding them manually, if I could upload it via a gedcom or any other file type I would prob use this site.
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Richard Belz AMEN! I just joined Geni and there is no way I am going to manually add all my existing tree data. I use Family Tree Maker and sync to a paid subscription to an Ancestry Tree. I put my tree on Family Search via a GEDCOM and would gladly add it to Geni as well. But a manual update - get real.
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Jeff, Geni Curator The three browsers that SmartCopy supports are free and available on MacOS and there is no cost to add profiles to Geni.
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Richard Belz SmartCopy? What is this and how do I use it? Better yet, what are the browsers in WINDOWS that SmartCopy supports? Believe it or not, everyone doesn't use MacOS.
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Jeff, Geni Curator I was replying to the first post, where she says she's using Safari. Safari is a Mac browser. SmartCopy supports Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera which are available for all Operating Systems for free.
Here is a link to the SmartCopy project. It can be used to copy families into Geni from other websites. https://www.geni.com/projects/SmartCopy/18783
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Jim Henderson Donna, Hal, Lou and Richard,
I understand your frustration at not being to upload a GEDCOM file to Geni. Uploads were allowed some years ago, but that caused so many duplicate entries that it became a lot of work for the volunteer Curators to fix everything up.
You see, at Geni we are cooperating to build a single tree for the whole world. I might talk about "my branch", but not "my tree". Here at Geni we talk about "our tree", and we help each other to get the facts right and to document them.
I described some of the benefits that I have found from working at Geni in my response on March 30, 2017, in the conversation at
https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115007056108-Jeff-stop-?flash_digest=c9fc19ec62728baceb761ea39984ecfdbd3c0c94&page=1See also my comments at
https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115004832634-Upload-GEDCOM-to-GENI?page=1#community_comment_360002343133
and I outlined an effective procedure on October 17 at
https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360002964354-Adding-a-GED-FILE?page=1#community_comment_360002272394I hope you find these ideas helpful as you consider whether or not to join us at Geni, working on the Whole World Family Tree.
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Adrian Charles Ferramosca So why should I sign up to Geni if I can't upload my tree? I have 5000+ members. Presumably you don't want my data as I'm sure you can't possibly believe I will type it all in again!!
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Jim Henderson Adrian, please read again the links I have put above. You'll see that there is a way you can add what you have found out about your ancestors to what other users of geni have already added to the Whole World Tree. I think you'll find that most of your 5,000 relatives are in the tree at geni already. Remember, this is a cooperative tree, and each person should have only one profile in the tree.
Geni works on a different principle from that of other sites, like Ancestry or MyHeritage. At Ancestry or MyHeritage, I can upload a GEDCOM file of "my tree", and I can make myself related to Charlemagne, King Henry VIII and any other famous people that I want to. At Geni, we talk about "our tree", and we use peer review to help each other get the facts and relationships correct.
Also, at other sites, when I bump into a profile in "someone else's tree" I can copy information from that other tree, but I can never join "my tree" to "the other tree". At Geni, when I add an ancestor, (such as my g-grandmother, Adelaide Sturt Morphett) who is already in the tree, I see a blue marker, inviting me to merge my branch into the existing tree. I click on that, compare the profiles, and if they match well, request a merge. The manager(s) of the profile in the tree already will also review the match, and approve the merge. Then "my branch" becomes connected to "our tree", and I can explore seamlessly across the whole family, from that perspective.
In your case, here are the benefits that I see, of your copying some of your relatives from "your tree" into "our tree":
- You'll find many of your relatives are in the tree already, often with documents to support facts about them, and photos
- You'll have only one date of birth, date of death etc to compare with potential matches, rather than 5 or 10 versions, as happens at other sites. (That's the main reason I joined Geni.)
- You'll be able to discuss details of relatives with other researchers, and work together to get the facts right together. I often find that people closer to a particular ancestor than I am are prepared to pay the money to get scans of documents, and these shed light on problems that are not helped by the selected details that are available online.
- When you add the "SmartCopy" extension to your browser, you'll find that it shows up inconsistencies in the tree at Geni automatically, and alerts you to problems in data you may have copied from someone else's work. For example, a relative of mine, David George Blackwell, appears with the notification that several of his children were born before he married their mother, Mary Grace. They were church workers, so this seemed unlikely to me, so I started searching public records, and found that these were children of his first wife, Martha Jane. I am in the process of checking these details, and expect to add Martha to "our tree" at Geni, and assign the earlier children to her. All this from the automatic consistency checking at Geni.
So those are the reasons that I think you will find benefits from joining us at Geni. I hope you do, and bring us the benefit of your research.
Here's how I suggest you go about it:
- If your GEDCOM is not represented in an online family tree, get a free trial account at MyHeritage of some other site that SmartCopy works with. Create a new tree there and upload your GEDCOM file.
- Search your ancestors for a deceased person with an unusual name, such as my ancestor, Adelaide Sturt Henderson (Morphett), and then search for that person at Geni. Repeat with similar people until you find a match already at Geni.
- Compare your tree with what you find at Geni, working toward the more recent people, until you find a spot where you have people who are not at Geni.
- Provided that you have evidence to support a relationship, you can then add a son or daughter to the tree at Geni, and use SmartCopy to quickly copy, family by family, the rest of that branch until you reach the most recent "leaves". (After copying each family, it is important to check the tree at Geni, looking for blue markers, to see if you need to merge profiles.)
- Repeat from point 2 until you have included all the branches of "your tree" into "our tree" at Geni.
- Then you can work back toward the distant past, comparing "your tree" with "our tree", adding documents and correcting details where you have better evidence, and "our tree" will be much the better for your work :-)
Then, I hope you'll also be thinking "our tree", rather than "my tree".
If you like, we could put our screens together over the internet and I could help you get started. Just send me a message through Geni.
I hope you join us in building the best Whole World Tree that we can.
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ing Jeroen M.W. van Dijk See https://help.geni.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360025932394-import-gedcom-or-other-csv for more info on this subject.
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Jim Henderson Better, I think, to use the procedure that I have outlined at
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Adrian Charles Ferramosca Well after spending 2 days trying to work with SmartCopy, I have given up.
Firstly you have to enter families one at a time. I have >1000 families. So not an option.
Secondly, each family you enter clearly has common people between the family of the parents or children. So you get duplicates coz SmartCopy is not so smart. So you have to go back and merge duplicates.
Thirdly, the SmartCopy import frequently contains errors, from what I have seen with step children: it can't seem to work out the parents. And after 1 hour trying to fix one stepchild, I give up. It remains there as an error.
Lastly SmartCopy has a mind of its own, at some random points it does not give the option to import, rather giving you the option of researching this person instead, not useful.
In summary I have 2 very large trees (mine and my wife's) with > 10,000 individuals. I have exported them in GED format. Unfortunately Geni cannot import GED files for some reason, so they will just have to live on my harddrive.
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Jim Henderson Congratulations on your work. You have linked to the branch of the Whole World Tree at Geni which contains your great grandfather, William Richard Borain, b3c4, (https://www.geni.com/people/William-Borain-b3c4/6000000048235248944) who was there already. When you look at him in the tree, you see that he has 3,119 relatives whom you can access without doing any work.
And that with just using SmartCopy twice to get there from your own profile.
You already have an extensive tree at Ancestry, so I'm wondering what benefits you are seeking, hoping to import your GEDCOM file to Geni.
I haven't ever seen SmartCopy offering more research, so I would love to share screens and see that happening. I'll email you through the Geni system to find out what timezone you are in and when we could schedule a video conference.
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Adrian Charles Ferramosca Thanks Jim, the reason I wanted to put it on Geni is that every time I go to Ancestry.com or myheritage.com, I keep getting asked for money. I have uploaded my trees to both websites over the years but when I go there now, I get messages saying I have exceeded my allowance or something, which means I can't update them. So I thought of uploading to Geni instead which I understand is free. But I didn't realize uploading to Geni is such a palaver.
cheers Adrian
btw I have 1000's more individuals (William Richard's ancestors and their families/descendants and also for the Ferramosca side) to add.
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Jim Henderson Well, you can leave your data at Geni with a "Basic" free account and it won't go away, and you can add people and photos, but it is difficult to search and add documents with a free account. It pays to become a Pro member, which does cost money.
If you just want a free place to store "your trees", how about uploading your GEDCOM files to FamilySearch? Then many search engines will find your relatives, and your contributions will be helpful to everyone.
If you want to merge your research into a Whole World Tree, and not pay for the privilege, you might like to go to WeRelate.org, where they admit that the GEDCOM upload process is complicated. They describe it at
https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Help:Before_you_import_your_GEDCOMThere are over 2 million profiles there already. I think it is more cumbersome to edit profiles there than at Geni, so I pay for a Pro account at Geni.
A bigger free Whole World Tree site is WikiTree. They have over 12 million profiles for your ancestors to mesh with. You can upload a GEDCOM file at WikiTree, but you need to link the people from it into the Whole World Tree a family at a time. There is a good tool, GEDCOMpare, to help you compare people from your GEDCOM file with people who are in the Whole World Tree at WikiTree already. I find it more cumbersome to edit profiles at WikiTree than at Geni, however, so I pay for a Pro account at Geni.
And Geni now has over 129 million profiles in the Whole World Tree.
I hope you reconsider using SmartCopy to copy your ancestors from your tree at Ancestry, to enrich the Whole World Tree at Geni. I find SC easier to use than any other way of bringing families into a Whole World Tree.
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Bjørn P. Brox In the Oslo meeting, MyHeritage Live, Geni announced that GEDCOM import will return in a limited form - (will look for duplicates etc), and the curators are currently testing it. Testing shows that it currently need some more work, so I don't know when it will be official.