Their front page sounds good. Join, add your tree, meet other relatives & work together on creating one world tree. It’s all nonsense.
In reality “meet other relatives” means working for Geni.com for free. You merge duplicate profiles & memorials others have added to their own tree. Once you do it’s no longer your tree. Now it’s a shared tree. Everything merged is co-managed with strangers who may or may not be related to you. If their tree is a mess now it’s your mess because it’s a shared tree. There’s no way to undo it. There’s also no button to push to simply delete the whole mess because it’s no longer your tree. It’s part of their one world tree.
I’ve lived online for 17 years. I know the net, websites & software. Too many of the people who join these sites are clueless & don’t care to read anything. They’ll create a mess & not realize they’ve done so & as a result not even bother to clean it up. The site owners don’t clean it up. It’s up to other users like me who know the net, websites & software. Next thing you know you’re not working on your tree. All you’re doing is merging duplicates & cleaning up other people’s messes. Because to leave it is to have a messed-up tree.
People can add thousands at one time via a GEDCOM file. And if they do it more than once they start off with duplicates that either have to be merged or deleted. You can only delete one by one. Luckily, I deleted everybody I alone managed first. Because if you delete somebody you co-manage with somebody else they’ll ban you from their site & block you from your own tree. Then they’ll hand everything you once managed alone over to total strangers who aren’t even related to you.
Since I was banned, they’ve readded the people I deleted including my parents & stolen my family pics. There are complaints about them all over the net. I can’t believe a Gov’t agency hasn’t shut them down yet. I also can’t believe a group hasn’t co-hired an attorney. All I can do is warn people about them so consider yourself warned.
