Reliability of this site

Nope, it's all "honor system". There are NO free and few if any pay Internet sites that are immune from Garbage In-Garbage Out.

Geni is, as far as I know, unique in being "crowdsourced", which means that everything (pastward of C. 1750-1850) is capable of being checked by everybody. This has its good points and its bad points. Catching egregious errors is easier, for instance (people post about them in Discussions all the time). But importing errors from other sites is an ongoing problem.

*Just because it's on the Internet, or published in a book, doesn't mean it's true.*

As for ancestors, everybody has 'em, and the farther back you can push your line, the better the odds of latching onto an ancestor from the upper classes. Once you've got one of *those*, you're almost certain to find a Royal somewhere further back. (Some of those old kings were infamous horndogs, and they married off their non-marital children and discarded mistresses to their own advantage.)

Every so often somebody scrambled up the ladder so far and so successfully that their descendants got into the club - William the Marshal is a case in point: he's somewhere in the tree of almost everyone with British Isles ancestry, either as great-X-grandfather (the usual case) or great-X-uncle (almost as common), and sometimes both.

Thanks Maven B. Helms for the reply. I'll look to see if we're connected. For sure, I don't believe everythingl is "Truthful" on the internet or in books; however, testimonials and professional approval of this site would go a long way towards accountability. Perhaps a professional profile of those who are the major players or a seal of approval for a known professional genealogical society (if there are any)? I am a geni.pro and I manage several of my family profiles. Nevertheless, most professions generally require-credentials.
These, of course, are my musings and I recognize that others may not share them. Go

Hi Ginnie

Great questions & thoughts actually. I wonder what we all can do (collectively) to improve Geni's reputation?

This project is a guide to curators

http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-Curators/9960

But it doesn't cover many terrific contributing members with excellent reputations, or indicate genealogical experts in different areas; some are covered here:

http://www.geni.com/projects/Prominent-Genealogists/15415

The biggest "problem area" I see is (trying to make the) leap across the Atlantic. On either side Geni tree is getting better all the time.

Exactly where I find my trouble. An elderly gentleman, Glenn Martin (aka Glenn Martin Genealogy Library, Princeton, KY) explained that when your line connects to Royalty, ancestors burst (it seems) onto your ancestry chart. The reason? They kept records! And finding the link maybe illusive.

I'll give this some attention. It was just hard knowing how thrilled I was to find Geni.com to only read negativity about the site. I trust you. I am ignorant as to how this all works; but I'd like to learn.

In the next few days I'll get back to this conversation. Today I'm arranging the particulars for our Caldwell Co. Historical Society meeting this evening.

Thanks for the reply.
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Ginnie

My crystal ball says Geni will eventually totally disintegrate - ie become a total mess. I just hope it is not soon.

Supposedly at one point "Master Profile" was a designation to be used to indicate quality - but now that is just one of many reasons a Profile might get that designation.

So no - no designation of quality or reliability or etc.

Ginnie - Would your society be interested in a letting us put up a Geni project page for them? It would increase their social media presence, and give us a place to showcase & collect our relatives. I've been meaning to do a Dawson Springs, Hopkins county project for years, and it would help my learning to work with the materials your local historians collect & have validated.

Lois - I am, I believe, the very first person to make a Master profile, or one of the first five. It was at request of the then CEO of Geni, to prevent two similarly named ancestors of his from being Mis merged (again).

So actually the very first purpose for an MP is that one. "two MPs cannot be merged."

I don't know how much you are in the parts of the tree I'm in, and how much I'm not in other parts of the tree. But American "royalty" is, for instance, the passengers on the Mayflower, and there are 20 million or so living persons who can trace to those 51 surviving persons.

On Geni they are unique MPs; their ancestry (if known) is reasonably accurate; they have hundreds of managers; and since they're pretty well covered in history books, they can be considered rather well documented also, even if all there is a link to a Wikipedia page.

It this was Geni's only achievement that would be quite enough to be gathering "thank you's" from every American, but it's merely mine and our members.

I turn the challenge around to every single kvetcher. There is nothing to stop each and every one of you from correcting errors. No one can do it "for" you.

As grist for the conversation

http://www.columbian.com/news/2011/nov/28/we-need-a-bigger-table-ma...

Being a Mayflower descendant is nothing unusual, he continued. The only thing that’s unusual is actually knowing about it.

“Estimates peg the number of Mayflower descendants at probably close to 20 million people living today,” he said.

Depending on how old you are now, you have to count back about 13, 14 or 15 generations to get to your ancestors who were alive in 1620.

“Everyone has roughly 32,000 ancestors in generation 15 alone,” Johnson said. “That’s a lot of chances to find a Mayflower ancestor.”

All in the families
The gene pool gets even wider and deeper when you consider all the Plymouth colonists. While President Barack Obama is not descended from a Mayflower passenger, Johnson said, he is descended from Samuel Hinckley, an early settler of Plymouth Colony.

“It is very typical to be descended from multiple Mayflower passengers,” said Johnson, and he can trace his family tree back to 13 of them. “Having as many as 13 is definitely rare. I’ve only met a few people with an equal or greater number than myself. Most people have just a few.”

On the other hand, “Having only one is equally quite rare; normally, if you have one, then you have several. Because the population of Plymouth Colony was relatively small for the first couple of decades, it was quite common for the children or grandchildren of one Mayflower passenger to marry the children or grandchildren of another.”

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Which is how I became a Mayflower descendant cousin.

And we had no idea of that until working with Geni.

Jamestown is another "hot spot", and one that tends to get forgotten about unless someone is trying to connect to Pocahontas. The records are pretty good, though not as extensive as Plymouth/New England generally, and with a significantly better chance of finding a "gateway ancestor" back to European nobility/royalty. One reason is that they didn't burn their bridges (or metaphorically sink their boats) behind them - people with connections "back home" tended to keep them up. Another is that some younger sons of the upper middle and lower-upper classes figured their chances of becoming Somebody were better in the New World, especially if they were the youngest in a large family (Col. Nathaniel Littleton is a favorite example).

Just across the mouth of the Chesapeake to the east is a major bramble-bush: Accomack and Northampton Counties, on the south end of the Delmarva Peninsula. People who settled there tended to stay there for generations on end, and to intermarry because geography limited their choices so much. If you're descended from *one* early Accomack/Northampton settler, chances are you're descended from a whole bunch. (This will mess up Geni's attempts to calculate relationship paths - it can't handle more than one path at a time.)

The Delmarva was more or less ignored by genealogists until fairly recently, and one Moody K. Miles has made it his life's work to rectify that. The Miles Files http://espl-genealogy.org/MilesFiles/site/index.htm are the first place to look for Lower Delmarva ancestors - they're very detailed, reasonably accurate (lots of work with primary documents), and keep being improved all the time.

Some, but not enough, work has been done with the Maryland/Delaware Eastern Shore, particularly Somerset County, MD.

West across the Chesapeake and just south of Baltimore is yet another "hot spot": Anne Arundel County, MD. It was basically "Quaker Country", and the Quakers kept very good records. And it came in for intensive study by one Harry Wright Newman, who published several volumes of genealogical studies on Anne Arundel alone.

As far as I know I do *not* have any Mayflower ancestors - but Jamestown, Accomack/Northampton, *and* Anne Arundel, oh my yes!

As for Geni's reputation, it needs some refurbishing. They really should put it front and center that they are trying to create One Big World Tree, and that this is really not a site for people who want to keep their family trees private. (Lots of misunderstanding about this have caused, are causing and until they get straightforward about it will cause, a lot of hard feelings.)

Some of the internet reviews have been up for years and contain information that is no longer accurate - e.g. any references to "uploading a GEDCOM". Geni stopped allowing this a few years ago because they were absolutely swamped with duplicate profiles and bad info. (They still haven't entirely caught back up.)

Yes, the site has matured, but the reviews have not kept up with that process.

I just started looking at the Mayflower manifest and so far 7 I randomly chose to look up on geni.com all are in someway connected to my family or my husband's. Both our families have been in this country since the early days of settlement and that's all been documented by several sources.

If geni.com had a place (maybe it already exits) I would be glad to post a review that would show how it has had a positive effect on my desire to study my family's history through genealogy.
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