Day 8 of the Family History Connections Experiment encourages us to search our family trees for “famous people.” FamilySearch.org actually has an app one can use to do that – The Relative Finder. But, like the Compare-a-Face site, you need to have a pretty good tree on the FamilySearch website.
But, I knew there was a cool feature on the Geni site that would allow you to find the relationship path between two people. Geni.com is a commercial genealogy and social networking website, owned by MyHeritage. Like almost all other genealogy sites, it is very easy to upload your entire family tree to the site. (While you can upload a tree to the FamilySearch database, each person must be entered manually in order to show up in your personal tree. This helps decrease the errors found on many other sites.)
However, you can search for connections between yourself and those on the list of most popular profiles. A few years ago I wrote a post about my struggle in choosing who to include in my family tree. While writing that post, I discovered I was marginally related Albert Einstein. So, it seemed reasonable to return to the Geni site to find who else I shared a family bond with.
It’s quite a list! Although none are related by blood – the connections are all through marriage!!
And that’s only from a few of the profiles I chose to examine!! (Every once in a while Geni opens all profiles for you to connect to. If you don’t have a paid subscription, you can’t access master profiles of other people.)
I haven’t been notified of any connection to Jesus or Moses (I tried!), but you’ll be happy to know I am not connected to Kim Yong Un. Want to try this yourself? Follow the steps below which were listed on a Geni blog post.
- Go to our list of popular profiles
- Click on the name of a profile you find interesting
- Click the “How are you related?” button on the top of their profile
Let me know if you find anyone interesting!!
Who We Are and How We Got This Way 