How reliable  is the information on Geni and Family Search.? Is one more reliable than the other? Thanks. Marilyn Feingold

The sources used by My Heritage and Geni seem generally to consist only of what can be read on their subscribers' family trees. No genuine sources but you can build a tree of 50,000 people in a week or two and claim ancestry from King Alfred, Tutankhamen or the Queen of Sheba. All a lot of  nonsense.

If it's that easy, please do so and send us the link. Except connect me
to the Queen of Sheba, please.

Geni is more accurate and complete than any individual tree on Ancestry or MyHeritage in almost all cases, since it is a collaborative tree.  Why?  Think of it this way.  What would be more accurate and complete: a tree you do on your own, or a tree you do with other people who can detect and correct your mistakes and add missing data?  Of course there are errors on any tree.  Geni has 145 million connected profiles, so even if the error rate is 1% that would be almost 1.5 million errors.  But I can guarantee that every small, individual tree is bound to have a far higher rate of errors and omissions.  As for FamilySearch, they also have a large collaborative tree and it is often very good.  Again, finding some mistakes on another tree should never give anyone a false sense of superiority.  There is always work to be done on every tree, and the larger collaborative trees are necessarily going to be more complete and accurate than anything a single person could do on his or her own.

I get very annoyed with Geni because people add so much misinformation. Someone I’ve never heard of made me an uncle to my sister’s son. Problem is my sister never had a son. I’m not going to bother trying to fix it because it’s just one of many mistakes others have made with my data. I’m content with full control over my tree at Ancestry, but even then some people make really bad assumptions when they approve the “hints” from other trees. One woman with whom I had a miniscule DNA match was convinced one of my great-grandfathers belonged on her tree, so she added him as a spouse to her grandfather. When I told her to remove the connection she told me not to be so arrogant. (She did remove him.) 
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Elias Savada
Bethesda MD
esavada@...

ALWAYS build your family history using primary sources such as census records, birth, marriage, death records, wills, and if your are fortunate to have living relatives interview them.  Actually, do the interviews first or at least at the same time you are doing the paper trail.  Remember, your elderly relatives won't be around forever to ask questions. The primary documents aren't perfect, but you can iron out most difference by comparing and contrasting these sources.  Only then when you are on solid ground or in the event you hit brick wall, look at family trees posted by other people.  But don't take their postings as fact. I've seen some really careless work. Search out their sources for yourself and apply the same critical analysis that you use when doing your own research.

Jeffrey Gee
Arizona     

Elias. I agree. I’ll stick with Ancestry. But.... i have a distant cousin who adds unverified people to her tree even on Ancestry and I’ve mistakenly added some if it. Only to find that dates are wrong and two siblings can’t be 40 yrs apart etc. 
Geni has helped me with my religious relatives. 

How reliable is the information on Geni and Family Search.? Is one more reliable than the other?

The quality of the data completely depends on the specific family/branch and the habits and abilities of the users who have worked in your part of the tree on that platform.

I find it vastly easier to attach sources on FS; I think Geni makes it well-nigh impossible to create citations. Judging by the dearth of sources I've seen on Geni, I'm not alone in this opinion.

Regardless of which communal tree or trees you use (there's also WikiTree, and I think WeRelate still exists?), it's part of the nature of the beast that you should keep an offline (or at least private online) backup of your family lines. Yes, it's extra work, although there's software that can help (that I keep meaning to explore).

For the private online option, both Ancestry and MyHeritage are plagued by the same perpetual paywall problem: unless you shell out large sums to them on a regular basis, you get black-and-blue from running into the dratted things. Unfortunately, the link between MH and Geni means that you get the worse-than-teasers All The Time on Geni, too. (And the "best" part on MH/Geni is that it will cheerfully try to get money from you for the _tree_ data from FS, as if it were equivalent to historical record data, and as if you weren't the person who put it on FS in the first place.)

It's "choose your poison", really. FS and Mormons, Geni and paywalls, WikiTree and not-quite-coding. But I do believe in the communal tree concept; it's a whole lot better than the re-re-copying of utter dreck that goes on (because it is actively encouraged) on Ancestry.

Julia Szent-Györgyi
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