King  Gary 

Exactly two months ago today, I came upon a post over at TechCrunch that mentioned a genealogy website to create family trees, called Geni. I skimmed over the article, and it really appealed to me because my family has been trying to get a family tree going for quite some time now. I’m estimating that we probably managed to get nearly a hundred people connected to each other in our family, at the most, which is quite a number considering my family is spread out across 4 continents right now (I’m not sure if we have any presence in Australia.)

I started the family tree by simply adding myself and my parents. My father later on added a handful of people, including his siblings and his own parents, and then the family tree started gaining traction. Of course, some of my relatives don’t understand how to use the interface, but some of them are lucky enough to have someone in their household that is a technorati to help them out . Within a few weeks, we hit the hundred mark pretty quickly. Geni is extremely intelligent, in that the website itself is very viral. When someone in your family receives an email which says that they have been added to the family tree, then they have the choice of visiting the website with the link provided and add more relatives. The people that they add are usually those that are directly related to that person (i.e. parents, siblings, children, and spouse’s family!). This makes the growth of the site to be fairly exponential (there is still the fact that a large number of the people receiving the emails will be non-technically savvy, though, unlike more typical social networking sites.)

Fast forward one month later (to today), and I came upon reading a post by Michael Arrington (the author of the aforementioned TechCrunch), and he stated that his family was really getting into Geni. After some mindless browsing, I found myself upon the Geni blog, and I came upon a particular post that was made today, showing anonymous statistics of how many family members each family tree had. Well, it turns out that I’m in the top 100! My family tree currently has 763 people, so we’re on the very brink of the top 100 (the 100th largest family has 746), but I’m pretty sure that once we dig a bit deeper into our history, we’ll be adding more and more very soon