Geni – Build Your Family Tree With Ease

Geni provides an easy way for you to create and build your family tree. It’s an online application that is ideally suited for anyone interested in their family history. You start by entering your own name, which appears in a little box (pink for girls, blue for boys). Click on arrows on three sides to add people who are related (siblings or spouses, parents or children). You can do the same with every box you add, making it easy to build your immediate family tree within a few minutes.

However, you will get even more from Geni, when you click on the individual boxes and edit the information they contain. That allows you to add maiden names for women, birth dates, places of birth and much more. You can even add photos (and entire albums). Other information you can add includes the birth order (for siblings), whether a person is divorced and whether they are alive or dead. Most of this can be done with a single click.

Once you have a few people in your tree, the different sections collapse, with a little number above to show how many people have been hidden. Just click on a person to center the tree around him or her. Another good feature is the ability to add email addresses for family members and invite them to update the tree. This collaborative process facilitates building an extensive family tree. Tabs allow you to navigate around the wide range of information that is included, and all of this is just in the free version. The Pro version contains even more features. Geni is by far the simplest family tree application we have ever used and it’s certainly worth five stars.