Crowd Sourcing the Eden Family Tree

I had the awesome idea a few weeks ago that I should build an online crowd-sourced family tree web site.  Like with all business ideas your first task is to see what’s going on with your competition.  I began by doing a few searches and found to my dismay that there is already someone doing it, and doing it quite well.  That site is http://www.geni.com/.

Eden Family Tree

Eden Family Tree

To continue my research I thought I should give the site a spin. They allow you to quickly add TONS of details about any family members.  After you add a few you can quickly build your entire tree by connecting to Facebook and inviting your family members to participate.

In my case I had already utilized Family.Show to build out a tree a few months ago.  So I quickly imported my data into Geni and began to fill in the additional info that Family.Show did not support storing.

After only about 30 minutes I have a HUGE family tree built out, and Geni is already matching family members in my tree to potential overlaps in other member’s trees!

Eden Family Map

My family so far

It seems that I have quite a varied background like most Americans.  I have ancestors from Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, Germany and much of the north-eastern United States.  All this and I’ve only been able to trace my roots back to the late 1700’s.

I’m very excited to see what I’m able to find with the help of the rest of my family!

  • David Athay

    Aaron, this is cool. Have you found some of the public resources for deeper information like http://www.familysearch.org? That might help you get past that 1700’s barrier.

    –David

    • aaroneden

      Awesome, thanks for the tip David. I’ll check that out!

  • Dawn

    This is really cool Aaron. I’ve been adding to the tree this morning…easy and fun! Thank you for getting the ball rolling 🙂

    • aaroneden

      I’m glad you’re finding it valuable! I can’t wait to see how far back we can trace things. Did you see the link David posted here for FamilySearch.org? I has a TON of great data!