Importing Geni data to DNA.Land

We all know the frustration of e-mailing one of our DNA relatives, but not getting any response from the person, and sometimes we are not able to respond quickly to the requests of others. Wouldn’t it be great if we as a community could reduce the frustration? DNA.Land wants to help.

A family tree of 70,000 people in our study of public data of Geni.com by the Erlich lab. Green nodes denote individuals, red nodes denote marriages. For scale, purple nodes represent the first 500 nodes in our data.

In short, DNA.Land is a free, not-for-profit website created by Columbia University and the NY Genome Center that allows genealogists to get more out of their genomic data while helping to advance science. DNA.Land has grown quickly and beyond our expectations to over 14,000 genomes. We are excited to launch new features to the website which include importing data from Geni.com, and adding the Find Relatives of Relatives report. Since the purpose of these two features is to facilitate interaction between genealogists, in this short blog we explain how to import Geni.com data, and how that can help reduce the frustration of non-response from matches.

Importing data from Geni.com

We introduced to DNA.Land the option to connect your Geni profile to your DNA.Land account. By doing that, your matches will not only see your email address, but also a link to your Geni profile (see figure below).

The new relative report. The red arrow point to the link for the Geni profile

Clicking on this link will re-direct them to your Geni profile to start the genealogical investigation until you answer their email. Of course, when your matches do the same thing, you will see his/her Geni page. Because we wanted to make a super-simple connection to Geni, you don’t need to download anything or even go to Geni.com. In your profile page, you will see the following button:

Click on this button and put your Geni username and password to import your Geni data. Please note that DNA.Land does not send any of your private DNA data to Geni. We also do not see your Geni password. (See a detailed explanation here). After a few seconds, DNA.Land will tell you that you are connected to Geni.com.

Simple!

As usual at DNA.Land, your data also helps science. In the past, we analyzed public information form Geni.com for various scientific questions. For example, we traced historical migration events by analyzing massive familial datasets at Geni.com. We used natural language processing to convert the birth location of individuals into precise longitude and latitude, and we created a movie that shows the location of millions of individuals. Each pixel in this movie is a person; in fact, one of them might be you or one of your ancestors!

How cool is that?

So to summarize, importing your Geni data will help you, your relatives, and science. Thank you for participating in DNA.Land!