some questions

[Vicki]

On marriages and partners...My father had a first ex wife. Then he
fathered a child with a woman. Then he married my mother and she
died. Then he married once more before he died. In listing the
marriages/relationships there's no way to differentiate or put them in
order...there's just a list of first/second etc marriage to choose
from. I'm calling the "partner" a marriage for now to properly order
them but that's not really accurate.

How can I find out if anyone else has created a tree that connects to
my tree and then how can I connect them?

Overall I think it's a great idea and great site and look forward to
seeing its growth.

Vicki

[Mike - Geni]

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the site. In response to your
first question, you should find that if you set "first marriage" and
"second marriage" the site will order them accordingly. We've chosen
to perform a reverse sort in order to keep most-recent spouses closer
together (especially in the case of a current spouse and an ex-spouse)
although we've seen the feedback from a few users who would prefer it
the other way.

Merging of separate trees is high on our to-do list, and it will
include resolving conflicts / overlap in the two trees, so go ahead
and keep doing what you're doing, and once we're ready to merge trees
we'll notify users when there appears to be a connection!

Mike

[edelwater]

holy cow, merging and syncing of 2 trees must be one of the most
difficult
programming algorithms out there.

There are so many variables.

I almost can not imagine that this will be an automatic process. There
will be duplicates,
2 persons with total different info, name conflicts, date conflicts,
orphans, ... I tried
once to merge a gedcom tree from someone else with mine but he had all
last names as "DELEAU"
while we had "de Leau"...

I searched for merging of genealogy info on the Internet, will you
first convert
the two trees to GEDCOM and then apply existing merge functionality
algorithms on the
intermediate format? Will you buy an existing package to get started
or will you invent
all algorithms from scratch on?

[Qwestf...@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/7/2007 4:57:05 P.M. Central Standard Time, mike...@gmail.com writes:

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the site.  In response to your
first question, you should find that if you set "first marriage" and
"second marriage" the site will order them accordingly.  We've chosen
to perform a reverse sort in order to keep most-recent spouses closer
together (especially in the case of a current spouse and an ex-spouse)
although we've seen the feedback from a few users who would prefer it
the other way.

Merging of separate trees is high on our to-do list, and it will
include resolving conflicts / overlap in the two trees, so go ahead
and keep doing what you're doing, and once we're ready to merge trees
we'll notify users when there appears to be a connection!

Thanks for the answers.  My concerns for the ordering of the marriage is partners that weren't married.  Technically my mother is my father's second wife but because he had a child with another woman inbetween and I want to include him as my brother the only way to do it was to list his mother as second marriage and my mother as third wife...not all that big of a deal but it isn't technically right and as a gal who's been doing geneology for 30 plus years I do like things squared up.

 

Thanks for all your hard work.

 

Vicki

---

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[Mike - Geni]

Thanks for the clarification. I'll be sure to share this scenario
with the team as we further refine the handling of spouses and
partners. My initial reaction is that the "partners" tab should ask
for a strict ordering of all spouses/partners, but that ordinal titles
(second wife/husband, third, etc) would apply only to the ordering of
spouses and would ignore partners and ex-partners. Does that make
sense?

Mike

Mike

On Mar 7, 3:30 pm, QwestforPe...@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 3/7/2007 4:57:05 P.M. Central Standard Time,
>

> mike.g...@gmail.com writes:
>
> I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the site. In response to your
> first question, you should find that if you set "first marriage" and
> "second marriage" the site will order them accordingly. We've chosen
> to perform a reverse sort in order to keep most-recent spouses closer
> together (especially in the case of a current spouse and an ex-spouse)
> although we've seen the feedback from a few users who would prefer it
> the other way.
>
> Merging of separate trees is high on our to-do list, and it will
> include resolving conflicts / overlap in the two trees, so go ahead
> and keep doing what you're doing, and once we're ready to merge trees
> we'll notify users when there appears to be a connection!
>
> Thanks for the answers. My concerns for the ordering of the marriage is
> partners that weren't married. Technically my mother is my father's second wife
> but because he had a child with another woman inbetween and I want to
> include him as my brother the only way to do it was to list his mother as second
> marriage and my mother as third wife...not all that big of a deal but it isn't
> technically right and as a gal who's been doing geneology for 30 plus years I
> do like things squared up.
>
> Thanks for all your hard work.
>
> Vicki

> <BR><BR><BR>**************************************<BR> AOL now offers free
> email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL athttp://www.aol.com.

[Qwestf...@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/10/2007 1:17:19 P.M. Central Daylight Time, mike...@gmail.com writes:

Thanks for the clarification.  I'll be sure to share this scenario
with the team as we further refine the handling of spouses and
partners.  My initial reaction is that the "partners" tab should ask
for a strict ordering of all spouses/partners, but that ordinal titles
(second wife/husband, third, etc) would apply only to the ordering of
spouses and would ignore partners and ex-partners.  Does that make
sense?

Yep makes sense to me.  It's a hard thing to include all the possible relationship in today's world.  Yours is the first site that I've ever seen really allow for the idea of unmarried partners and those relationships of the same sex.  Good job.

Thanks,

Vicki

---

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[Mike - Geni]

edelawater, I just now saw your message; there are certainly some
"gotchas" that come up when merging trees, but we're excited to do
it. Converting to GEDCOM and then using an existing merge tool is an
interesting idea, but we would lose data in the process (because Geni
keeps more data than what GEDCOM supports) unless we then merged the
resulting GEDCOM files back into our database. We're already working
on the merge tools, so I suspect we'll end up doing the whole thing
ourselves.

By the way last week's update included a GEDCOM export feature that we
have yet to publicize; keep an eye on the blog for instructions!

Mike