Deadpoet’s Cave

A few days ago, Kevin introduced a few of us to Geni. It’s a free online family tree/genealogy tool. Quite appropriate, in the light of what I’ve discovered recently.

I had already set up a family tree on Singapore Family Tree when it was launched last year. Somehow, it didn’t seem too engaging. I’d invited some family members to join but they didn’t contribute. So, it remained stagnant. I have to admit that part of the inertia was that I had no leads beyond what I had entered into the family tree. But that does not account for the fact that I wasn’t very bothered about typing in everything I knew or could easily find out.

My Geni experience was very different.

Registration kills two birds with one stone. You fill in your name and email, then click Start. With that, you’ve registered with Geni as well as created your bare bones profile. They send you the password for your account, which you can change later.

Adding people to the tree is a cinch. Just click on one of three arrows to add family members: up for parents, down for children, and sideways for siblings and spouses. You’ll need a first name and surname to fill in a profile. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit. There are lots of fields where you can fill relevant information to your heart’s content or to the limit of your knowledge, whichever comes first.

That leads me to my next point: Some of your relatives know more about your family than others.

I set up a very basic tree, consisting of my immediate family: parents, siblings, grandparents and great-grandparents. I opted to invite my parents and siblings to use the service. This is where things got interesting.

My mum was the first to accept the invitation. I saw an email notification and thought nothing more of it. When I next logged in, I was surprised to find that she’d filled in the details of her siblings! Not only that, she’d invited some of her sisters, who also started building their own trees.

Viral, I tell you!

Now, my mum isn’t the most tech-savvy person by any means. I had to coach her for a while before she got the hang of blogging. Geni, on the other hand, was so intuitive that she registered and started using it. All on her own.

Seeing how Mum did that, I entered what I knew about my father’s siblings. I also corrected some technical details on Mum’s entries, most of which were default settings that needed to be changed to more accurately reflect reality. I also had to change a few options to display my grandmother’s spouses (whose first husband died) accurately on the tree. Then, I added my cousins. I missed out a few which I have had almost no contact with. Once again, Mum chipped in to fill in the blanks.

I’m not sure if she’s getting email updates on changes, but I know that she’s been logging in to help flesh out the tree!

Geni is pretty amazing. It is a family tree with a rudimentary social network. It’s about the easiest online tool I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and well thought out. There are also tons of features and settings for advanced users. It’s a worldwide service, so users might even connect with long-lost or previously unknown family members. Most importantly, it’s fun.

That’s a lot more than I can say for SFT. It’s an admirable effort but it pales in comparison. Plus there is the suggestion that SFT will not always be free or available. On the sidebar, it says: “Your account will expire in 266 Days”. Not reassuring at all! I want my family tree to persist!

Oh, yes… one more thing.

Listen carefully, I will only say this once:

My father’s sister is married to my mother’s brother.

So, both of them appear on either side of the family (from my perspective). Thankfully, it seems that Geni has an elegant solution to this situation in my family. Apparently, if you enter the same email address in two profiles, Geni will ask if you want to merge those. You can create a dummy email address if that person doesn’t have one. I haven’t tried this out because I want to use an actual email address, which I am sure at least my aunt has. I wonder how it will look like in Geni.

I acknowledge that Geni won’t alleviate the difficulties I face in finding out about my grandparents siblings and more about preceding generations. These mysteries will take a lot of groundwork to solve. I believe, this might require digging in Malacca and KL Archives. This is a long-term, slow-burn project. At very least, I know that all the pertinent family details are stored safely in Geni, with a tiny glimmer of hope that distant relatives might discover the Lost Pintos.

UPDATE I managed to merge profiles!

Another UPDATE Kevin blogged about Geni, highlighting this post. Oh, and my cousins have been getting in on the act too.

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