Hur fungerar Geneanet?

GeneaNet will collect all flash lists sent by users, will add them to its database (over a hundred million in 2005), and will let any user consult them for free! When comparing hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of files, the chances of encountering similar data are very greatly multiplied! It's on this founding idea that GeneaNet was born.

You can use these flash lists in two ways:

1: When you are connected and type a name in on the home page, you get in a glimpse all the flash lists sent by other users from around the world who show an individual with that same name in their own genealogy.

You will note that for each name shown, outside dates for their first and last appearance as well as their location will be displayed. The first column, « contact » will contain a link back to the sender.

For example : supposing your name is Dupont and you see that there are 500 results for Duponts who lived in Nantes in all periods, it can be a bit disconcerting. But if your name is Duchefdelaville, and you've never met anyone with that name before, and moreover you come from Triffouillis-les-Oies in the deep Larzac, imagine what a delightful surprise it will be to see that Mrs. Martin from Tours or Mr. Muller from Strassburg, who you never even suspected existed, both sent their flash lists on Duchefdelavilles in Triffouilis-les-Oies, between 1740 and 1812 ! Better still, a John Duchefdelaville from New York City cites over a hundred of them, but between 1540 and 1670 and in a village 10 km away from Triffouillis-les-Oies, as well as all over the United States!

Obviously Mrs. Martin and Mr. Muller will no doubt have a lot to tell you, and as for John Duchefdelaville, he's probably a distant cousin, descended from a Duchefdelaville who emigrated to the US back in the eighteenth century !

2/ When you click on the link for someone who has a surname which interests you, you'll find their contact information: e-mail, sometimes a postal address, but also something very important and useful: the web pages for his online genealogy. These pages can take the form of a personal website, external to GeneaNet and be displayed in various ways, but in most cases it is an "online family tree" hosted right here on GeneaNet. This online family tree includes all the genealogical data supplied by the user, in which we can navigate from branch to branch, from parent to parent or from child to child.

Just contact this person via email (or regular mail) to start a correspondence in which he will tell you more about himself (quite often that he's your cousin!). Frequently, you will be able to add to your own genealogy, which you can then enter onto your own tree on GeneaNet, which itself will in turn be waiting to be contacted by yet another genealogist....

But this is not all, GeneaNet offers many other services, all dedicated to genealogy...