“How to Improve Your Family Tree with Collaboration on Geni.com” with Randy Schoenberg

Geni is an online genealogy platform seeking to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their close relatives to join their family tree. All Geni users can share photos, videos, and documents with their families. Geni’s Pro subscription service allows users to find matching trees and merge those into the single world family tree, which currently contains over 100 million living users and their ancestors. Additional pay services include enhanced research tools and premium support. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family.

In this talk, Schoenberg will provide insights into using the Geni platform to make connections and conduct genealogical research.

This program is made possible by support from the William M. Lowenstein Genealogical Research Endowment Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation.

E. Randol “Randy” Schoenberg is a volunteer curator on Geni, and one of Geni’s most active users, managing about 235,000 profiles. He has authored several articles for the journal Avotaynu pertaining to Geni and collaborative genealogy. He is a board member of JewishGen and the Co-Founder of JewishGen’s Austria-Czech Special Interest Group. He founded and moderates the Jewish Genealogy Portal group on Facebook. He is the author of the “Beginner’s Guide to Austrian-Jewish Genealogy” and the co-author of “Getting Started with Czech-Jewish Genealogy.” He has attended and spoken at numerous genealogy conferences, including the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in 1998, 2008, 2010-2020. Professionally, he is an attorney and past President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Schoenberg is the winner of numerous awards in the field of litigation, notably having represented Maria Altmann in “Republic of Austria v. Altmann,” resulting in the successful return of five Gustav Klimt paintings as depicted in the film Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren. Mr. Schoenberg graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a certificate in European Cultural Studies and received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Southern California. He maintains a blog at http://schoenblog.com.