Family Tree Service Comparison

I'm no expert. I've had my family tree on MyHeritage.com for several years, and it served me well as a place to story the complex web of information. I upgraded to Premium to overcome some limits of the free service. I've had problems with MyHeritage software on some computers; for example, I have not been able to edit notes for several years.

After a couple of years on MyHeritage, I started placing copies of my family tree on other services, such as Geni.com, to make it easier for family members to find me. I also have versions of my tree on ancestry.ca and FamilySearch.org. I've had some contacts through MyHeritage, but most contacts through Geni.

I should point out that I created by shadow trees haphazardly. Instead of exporting the data from MyHeritage and importing it into other services via GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication), I added some people here and there. It was a poor choice, because finding distant relatives would probably happen through second or third cousins, who were not making it into my shadow trees.

My volunteer genealogy work led to my adoption of Geni.com as my preferred software, at least for consulting, because

it's free (they have a Pro option, but I never found it worthwhile);
it's entirely web-based, so I don't need to keep clients' trees on my computer, and my clients' families could follow along, wherever they might be;
it holds the prospect of linking up to another, possibly huge, tree to build on other people's work;
it is easy for me to invite famly members to the tree, and for them to make additions, corrections, etc.;
it's easy to use (not that I don't have my complaints).

Some people, including some serious genealogists, hate Geni, complaining that merging with Geni's World Family Tree means a loss of control over how people are profiled, which in turn means a decrease in quality. The most extreme case I experienced after a merge was that my client appeared three times in the merged tree, once as her own mother! It took me over an hour to "trick" Geni into fixing the tree, but the result was that after a few hours of building a tree, merging a tree, and fixing the merged tree, my client had 1700 people in her tree going back 250 years, and her relatives got their trees corrected.

After working with just a few clients, I found it very convenient to add documents and pictures to Geni.com trees, much more convenient than with MyHeritage.com. I've started adding these to my own Geni.com tree, which I can now share with family. I shared birth, marriage, death, and immigration records outside of my MyHeritage tree, but I like having a predictable place to save them. For example, I could look at a person's timeline, choose an event, and find documents associated with that event.

So, I am migrating from MyHeritage to Geni, but the migration is complicated. MyHeritage bought Geni, and provides the search service used in Geni. Because I have many clients on Geni, I subscribe to MyHeritage Worldwide search, and through some trickery, I can use it for their accounts at no extra cost. (The trick is to search on my account, find some information, but not add it to a person in my tree because the information pertains to no one in my tree. Then I manually add the information to my client's tree, and once it is in there, Geni "finds" a Smart Match that I can confirm.) And, sigh, MyHeritage search is not too good, at least not in comparison with ancestry.ca, for which I have a Canadian subscription. (I have a similar trick with MyHeritage and ancestry to get the benefit of a Worldwide subscription at about a third of the cost.)

If I was starting over, I might start with Geni for my tree but search with ancestry. Or, I might just work with ancestry, because when I find a document in ancestry, I'm given the option of saving it to a person or persons in my tree. And when I find data (e.g., census), I'm given easy options to copy all that data to my tree. MyHeritage is starting to do that, and other services do the same sort of thing, but I am really impressed with how ancestry helps find records and what it lets me do with them.