About Geneanet

How does Geneanet work?

Geneanet is the largest community of genealogists involved in mutual aid and sharing in Continental Europe. It’s a website with almost 7 billion data points provided by members, partners, and through collaborative projects.

The contributive aspect is about family trees and attached documents (family pictures, archival records, etc.). We host 1.5 million family trees with over 1.6 billion individuals.

The collaborative aspect is about the many projects supported by Geneanet, for example pictures of graves and cemeteries (“Save our Graves”), indexes and registers (vital records, censuses, parish registers, Napoléon military muster rolls, notarial documents, and other archives), and collaborative trees (the Filles du Roy, the General Slocum disaster). It’s also original projects like “Now and Then”, comparing historical and modern views of a place.

Today, there are 4.4 million pictures of graves, 48 million images of archival registers, and more than 142 million individuals in the collaborative indexes.

The site supports heavy loads with more than 100 million requests per day, 8.5 million visitors per month, 380 terabytes of redundant storage on 60 high capacity servers located at different sites.

All these services are developped and maintened by a team of about thirty enthusiastic people based in Paris, France.

Geneanet is a “freemium” website

Geneanet is based on a freemium model which combines a free website and a Premium subscription.

Every member has access to a free offer with comprehensive features. This offer allows you to build a family tree with an unlimited number of individuals, available online (with privacy controls), ad-free, and with a number of tools for customization, printing and alerts, as well as a basic search engine by last name, first name and place. Unlike some other websites, you don’t have to pay to view the family tree of other members or contact them.

The free offer also provides access to all content shared by our members. All contributive data is available for free for all Geneanet members.

Geneanet also offers a Premium subscription which includes, among other options and services, advanced search with additional criteria: spouse, parents, name variants, nearby places, the automatic matching of your entire family tree with the Geneanet database, e-mail alerts which allow you to receive a weekly email summary of the latest entries, access to the Genealogy Library with millions of books and newspapers with more than 3.8 billion indexed individuals, access to genealogy society indexes provided by Geneanet partners, and personalised website support.

Geneanet, a free collaborative website thanks to Premium subscriptions

Sharing, mutual help and collaborative projects are fundamental to Geneanet. This is a large part of its attractiveness.

When you subscribe to Geneanet Premium, you’re not just getting services and partner data reserved for Premium members; your subscription also supports the development of the free sections of the site.

It is quite a paradox: Premium members are paying so that Geneanet can remain an open and free website.

Subscribing to Geneanet Premium is not only a way to access additional options and services, but to allow our special model described above to exist.

The Premium subscription was formerly called “Club Privilege”. Our first subscribers had little benefit and subscribed to preserve the free options and services.

We feel that it is important to remember our roots. For over 25 years, we are proud that we have succeeded in preserving this balance, in an ever stronger spirit of mutual collaboration.

In conclusion, you are all part of a singular community of mutual help and sharing. Whatever your level of Geneanet use, you are welcome! If you subscribe to or renew a Geneanet Premium subscription, keep in mind that you are not only purchasing a product, you are sharing a certain idea of genealogy.