Family Trees 2.0

A new crop of genealogy Web sites are designed to recharge the oldest social network in human history: the family

by Douglas MacMillan

In January, Bob Warden of Santa Rosa, Calif., received a rare e-mail from his 25-year-old nephew Christian. A link in the message directed him to Geni.com, a social-networking site where Christian had assembled a virtual family tree with names, pictures, birth dates, and e-mail addresses of the Warden clan, mapped out in pink and blue boxes. But Uncle Bob's help was needed: The tree was missing generations of aunts and uncles, cousins, and great-grandparents. Five months later, Uncle Bob's office is cluttered with cardboard boxes of old family photos and letters, and there are 538 relatives on the Warden family's Geni tree.

Geni takes up where the big social-networking sites have been known to leave off—family relations. "There are networks for friends, like MySpace. There are professional networks, like LinkedIn. But I thought a great omission was sites that help people stay in touch with their family," says David Sacks, a former PayPal executive who hatched Los Angeles-based Geni. Since Geni launched in January, a few hundred thousand users have started creating family trees, Sacks says.

But there's viral potential in the millions of "profile" pages these users have created. Each of these profiles is essentially a place card for every known member of a family, and users can e-mail invitations for relatives to join the project, filling in the profiles for their ancestors, themselves, and their next of kin.

Multigenerational Good Time

Geni isn't alone in its bid to take the age-old hobby of genealogy into the age of Web 2.0.

Ancestry.com, the leading Web site in the category, and others are adding a collaborative and social flavor to the simple desktop programs and Web sites individuals have been using to build family trees for more than a decade. These days, sites are offering MySpace-like community features so that relatives can work on their trees in tandem, share photos, access historical family documents, and create birthday calendars.

As with the Wardens, it's the younger, Web-savvier family members who frequently discover these sites and tip off their elders. But then it's often the baby boomers of the family who keep coming back: In April, 65% of the unique visitors to the top two family-networking sites were 45 or older, according to Nielsen//NetRatings (NTRT).

This older audience, an elusive market for regular online social networks, may be poised to swarm over family-oriented communities the way their kids do MySpace and Facebook. Unlike those sites, which have a relatively static, ad-supported model that users are accustomed to, family-focused online networks have taken a variety of approaches.

What Cost Family Roots?

Tree builders who want to dig deeper into history are paying for subscriptions to Ancestry.com, which boasts more than 2.5 million family trees. The site is the flagship service of the Generations Network, a Provo (Utah)-based company that in 1998 launched the Web site MyFamily.com and software named Family Tree Maker. Ancestry.com helps users dig through census records, newspaper clippings, military records, and other historical documents to build a vivid, interactive story of their families.

"We were a business focused on providing data and content to people. We're moving way beyond that," says Tim Sullivan, chief executive of the Generations Network. Over the past year, Ancestry.com has added a bevy of networking tools, including photo sharing and an audio-posting device that allows users to record family stories over the phone. It's free to build a tree and share it with others, but users pay an average annual subscription of $155 for access to the record books.