Geni is an American commercial genealogy and social networking website, founded in 2006,[1] and owned by MyHeritage,[2][3] an Israeli private company, since November 2012.

From there users may graphically manipulate sections of their connections network to create a complete personal family tree.

Projects are special interest groups organized around historical topics (e.g. "World War One - Casualties"), immigration patterns (e.g. "Norwegian American"), occupations (e.g. "Librarians"), place-names (e.g. "Christ Church, Oxford University"), or any other subject of general interest that will foster social discussion among members, as well as providing a portal to which biographical profiles may be linked.

From 2008[10] until December 2010, Geni had a built-in feature that allowed users to import their family history using the GEDCOM file format.

This can lead to strange results such as people born after their mothers have died or when their supposed parents were still small children.

Due to its size and geographic spread, Geni has been cited as a "key social media website" by researchers.

[17] Educators have used Geni's visual and social media attributes as a way to get students interested in family history.

"[19] In 2017, a multinational team of scientists led by Yaniv Erlich used 86 million publicly available profiles from Geni, of which 13 million were connected into a single family tree, to study the structure of historical populations over the past 600 years, mostly from Western Europe and the United States.