If you’re a regular visitor to my site, you probably read about my uploading the database to www.geni.com back in January 2009.  As a free user there were a couple of restrictions – one being that the automatic links for activity updates/photos I could easily see, was restricted to 5th cousins and closer.

That was fine by me as the most “distant” cousin I’m in contact with is Armin, Delphine & Maite – 3rd cousins once removed or 4th cousins.  It’s been my hope that using Geni would help increase the chances of breaking through some of my brick walls on the Judas and Dingwell branches.  Plus it allowed other cousins doing research to easily upload their data & merge it, upload photos and videos. And family members could easily add photos, videos, make date/location changes, etc.

Geni, has been slowly eroding these free features. Citing privacy changes, the latest change is the highest default for each persons family group setting is reduced from 5th cousins to 3rd cousins. (each user could restrict their profile more to no blood relatives, 1st cousins, 2nd cousins even limit in-laws which is at its maximum inlaws out to 1st cousins)

Now in my list of photo albums I no longer see the photos uploaded by 3rd cousin, once removed Delphine.  I can no longer send emails through Geni to Delphine, Maite, Armin (or their 1st cousins, descendants). They no longer appear in my tree list. Yes, I can still view their tree & photos/videos by finding our common ancestor, viewing that ancestor’s tree and following the branch till I find them – a more labour intensive search.

Time will tell how much these new limitations affect my tree life on Geni. I may just revert to using my estacaille.org website as my one database & work more on marketing the surnames I’m searching for.  And inviting more researching cousins to post copies their GEDCOMs/photos/documents here.