This has been mentioned a handful of times but since the question keeps coming up, here is one free alternatives to creating your family tree that you can then pay to have printed at your local copy store. This uses the data on geni.com to make your tree.
TreeSeek is a 3rd party company that has written a program that allows you to make cool looking charts based on your geni.com familytree data. You'll end up with a .pdf file that you can then print at your local print store on a large format printer. Even before you head to the copy store you'll be able to look at the file on your own computer prior to going to the expense of printing it out.
Using treeSeek is a two step process, first you create a tree, and then you create a chart based on that tree.
Go to their website and click on the "Start Now!" button. On the next screen click on the "Login" button underneath the "Geni" logo. You'll need to provide treeseek your geni.com username and password and authorize it to proceed.
Generating a tree for yourself or for a different member of your immediate family is easy.
1) Click on the green + “Create Tree” button.
2) Next pick the name of the close family member that you want to be at the root of the chart. And then have it generate the tree. TreeSeek should automatically offer to make a “tree” and you get to choose which of whether it uses one of your siblings, children, parents, yourself or your spouse as the root person. Once you select the “root” person click on the button for it to generate the tree data. Warning this takes about 5 minutes of crunching without much feedback that the web page is actually doing anything. When you are done you don’t actually have a chart or diagram yet but you will have a datafile that treeseek can turn into a chart.
It’s much more complicated to make a tree datafile for anyone outside your immediate family but it can be done. I’d suggest you have geni opein in one window and treeseek in a second window. To generate a tree for anyone outside your immediate family you’ll need their geni profile-id #. This is NOT the same as the number used in the web address for a profile. Instead you’ll need to look at the raw html code for a profile and search for the profile’s id number. Here is how to go about finding the secret profile-id number. While viewing the profile right click in your browser and choose “view source”, next search for the text “graph_node_id=profile”. Notice that to the right of the word profile will be a geni profile id #. This is the number you’ll need for treeseek.com.
For example look at the raw html for Abraham Lincoln’s geni profile Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA
In your browser right click, choose “view source” and while viewing the raw html search for the “graph_node_id=profile”. You should find a line that looks like the following: <a href="/revisions/history_lb?graph_node_id=profile-2143883&tab=about_me"
With the above example the text you would fill in for treeseek would be “profile-2143883” which can be used to generate a treedata file for Abraham Lincoln. Remember it takes about 5 minutes for the data to be generated.
Once your tree data file is created then you can use it to make a chart. The charts look pretty amazing. The choices are 9 or 4 generation fan charts, 4, 9 or 10 generation pedigree charts, or a name cloud. Now just save the .pdf file, print out an 8.5x11 version of it at home or take the file to a print shop and get a poster size printing done.
