Genes Reunited works on a very simple concept – put your family tree on-line with them and seek to match the people on your tree with those held on the Genes Reunited database.
You can build your family tree name by name, or you can upload a gedcom file from your computer. You can also download your tree from GR to your own computer.
You can search the family tree database by surname and first name and/or year of birth and/or place of birth. The site says it currently has over 110 million names on 6 million trees. The data in these trees has of course been supplied by other GR members, so cannot be viewed as a substitute for official records.
It is free to register, but if you want to make contact with another member or use many of the other services available, you need to be a paying member – currently a six-monthly subscription is £9.95; existing members have in the past been given a discount to renew, and there is currently no indication that this arrangement will cease. All correspondence is managed by the site – so e-mail addresses are not disclosed to those you contact unless you wish to do so.
You can share your tree with other members you are in contact with. The site generates, on a regular basis, a set of Hot Matches – names with birth years that match with your tree. Unfortunately these computer generated searches do not discriminate between birth places so many of these matches can be redundant.
The site has a number of message boards – Trying to find lost relatives, Genealogy Tips Board, Records Office Look-ups, and a General Board.
There is a portal to the 1901 Census on-line records database (owned by the same company, and reviewed here on GenBIRes), research advice articles, and occasional live webchats with expert Anthony Adolph – and these are archived back as far as 2004.
A younger sibling to the better-known internet phenomenon Friends Reunited, the site was officially launched in May 2003 as Genes Connected, changing to its current name in 2004. The best summary provided by the company about how Genes Reunited works can be found here on the Friends Reunited site.
What do you think about Genes Reunited – is it worth using, have you had success stories, are there any catches etc? Please leave a comment.
You can build your family tree name by name, or you can upload a gedcom file from your computer. You can also download your tree from GR to your own computer.
You can search the family tree database by surname and first name and/or year of birth and/or place of birth. The site says it currently has over 110 million names on 6 million trees. The data in these trees has of course been supplied by other GR members, so cannot be viewed as a substitute for official records.
It is free to register, but if you want to make contact with another member or use many of the other services available, you need to be a paying member – currently a six-monthly subscription is £9.95; existing members have in the past been given a discount to renew, and there is currently no indication that this arrangement will cease. All correspondence is managed by the site – so e-mail addresses are not disclosed to those you contact unless you wish to do so.
You can share your tree with other members you are in contact with. The site generates, on a regular basis, a set of Hot Matches – names with birth years that match with your tree. Unfortunately these computer generated searches do not discriminate between birth places so many of these matches can be redundant.
The site has a number of message boards – Trying to find lost relatives, Genealogy Tips Board, Records Office Look-ups, and a General Board.
There is a portal to the 1901 Census on-line records database (owned by the same company, and reviewed here on GenBIRes), research advice articles, and occasional live webchats with expert Anthony Adolph – and these are archived back as far as 2004.
A younger sibling to the better-known internet phenomenon Friends Reunited, the site was officially launched in May 2003 as Genes Connected, changing to its current name in 2004. The best summary provided by the company about how Genes Reunited works can be found here on the Friends Reunited site.
What do you think about Genes Reunited – is it worth using, have you had success stories, are there any catches etc? Please leave a comment.
3 comments:
This site used to be so good but lately several issues have let it down, the hot matches which potentially could be useful have turned out to be as cold as ice! They don't match names I have on my tree, they are only matched on name not place of birth so don't ever put John Smith on your tree.
Also recently the family tree facility was changed from what was an easy to use tree to a very badly designed, slow to load one. In fact it seems if you have too many people on your tree it simply crashes every time you try to open it.
Having said all of that I have had some very good and useful contacts through this site, but bearing in mind the increase in subscription I am reviewing my subscription when it comes up for renewal.
The sale of GR to ITV seems to have been the trigger for a lot of dubious marketing ploys.
A recent e-mail from GR asked me whether 'X X' was my ancestor, and claimed to have found details of them in the 1861 census.
Of course, they hadn't. They'd merely found someone with the same name and year of birth, and wanted me to buy credits to view their census images.
I shudder to think how the unwary might get sucked into buying useless data that way!
I've been using genesreunited for a couple of months now, and have found a large number of ancestors and relatives via the site.
On the negative side, the site isn't particularly pretty, and the family tree building especially is not a good user experience. One annoyance is the "Cannot delete multiple relations" problem, followed by no easy way to customise portions of the tree for printing (either which bits of the tree to print, or what information to show about each person on the tree).
It would be great if it would link to another tree via a given relation. Instead, you have to manually copy and paste information from somebody who's agreed to share tree information. It's very annoying!
I've never found the hot matches particularly useful - you'd think that it would exclude people who I've already made contact with.
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