#19 Web 2.0 Awards

I've mentioned this site before, but I just have to mention it again:

Geni is a social networking service for family trees. I created an account and started a tree for my family, inviting my mother and a few cousins. They, in turn, invited a few more. In the past few weeks it has snowballed and over 100 members of my extended family have accepted invitations to join the family tree. They are all adding the information they know about various ancestors. All I did was create the bare bones and now I have this great, rich resource in case I ever get the genealogy bug. It's also nice because whenever a new member accepts an invitation to our tree I get an email telling me exactly who they are and how we are related ("Jane Doe, your third cousin once removed, just accepted an invitation from Joe Smith your maternal uncle.").

The purpose of the site is not for researching your family tree, but for compiling the information once you have it. As my family's example shows, it takes advantage of the collective knowledge of the masses (in this case your extended family) the way all good social networking sites do. My family is pretty spread out over the country and we don't ever really have reunions of extended family, so I never would have had the chance to ask that third cousin once removed what she knew about our shared ancestors if it weren't for this tool. (Heck, I didn't even know she existed, much less her name or email address. That, in itself, would have taken me a lot of research to uncover. Through the power of social networking, I'm now in touch with many relatives I didn't know I had. And it barely took any work on my part!)