Two things which have concerned me with data entry:
1. Dates are all automatically converted by Geni to the American form of dating. When I started doing family history, I was instructed to always put dates in as day, month (first three letter abbreviation) and year. In that form, the dates could always be understood correctly internationally, and there is no confusion over which number is the date and which is the month.
2. The method Geni uses for simplifying place names leads to a lot of misrepresentation of exactly where an event happened. For instance in Germany, there are many, many towns with the same name. If you don't qualify kreis, province or some note of unchangeable landmark, you'll never know where to find the town in question on the map, such as Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt am Oder.
I was taught, also, you should always use the name of a place as it was at the specific date of the event. In other periods of time, places did and/or now exist where the name was or is now the same or different than it did at the time of the event. (I hope you can figure that one out.) There are many modern day places which have changed names over the centuries, which make the past name of a place no longer findable on any modern map. Places should be described as they are on the document concerning the event. Historical maps are plentiful, and it gives you a better feel for the history of the time. A prime example is the Elsass-Lorraine (Alsace-Lorraine) District between Germany and France. How many times has that piece of land changed national control. If you put a place in that area down as a present day address, you won't understand the difference of names and laws when it was under French rule, much less know where to go to find certain records. Many of my ancestors were born in S. Russia, which is today Ukraine, but you can't find many records or history from their time through the Ukrainian government, you have to go to the Russian or Soviet Union governments and histories to get the information you're looking for. I have a definitive book on Ukraine, printed in VERY small print and is about 3" thick, thousands of pages in length, and barely mentions the Germans who lived there, yet the Germans who lived around the north and northwest of the Black Sea made a huge impact on Russian and Ukrainian economics. They turned the Steppes into the "bread basket of Russia".
Also spellings - There are several towns named Munich and Munich with the umlaut over the u. the umlaut changes the sound of the u. If you are talking or writing to someone in Germany, they will have no clue which town you are talking about. A prime example: My parents traveled to Germany many years after my mother had emigrated from there. My mother speaks high? German, the dialect from Niedersachsen, and my father's family, being from the Schwabien part of Germany, spoke an entirely different dialect. Before they left, they agreed Mom would do all the speaking when it came to having to converse with non-family. They first went to Baden-Wuertemberg where my sister was living at the time (her husband was stationed there). Before they left there, they went to get train tickets to go to Munich (I don't know if it used the umlaut or not) in Niedersachsen. The ticket salesman kept trying to send them to the wrong Munich. After 10 or 15 minutes of the attempts to understand each other, and getting no where, Dad stepped in with his Schwabien German and the ticket salesman understood perfectly and exactly where they wanted to go, which also says a lot about the purity of this German group who had left Baden-Wuertemberg almost 200 years before this conversation took place. It also tells you many of the German dialects are completely unintelligible to each other, something my parents had forgotten from when Mom and her brother first arrived in McLaughlin, SD, where my father was born and raised. The problem between Mom's German and the ticket salesman's German, however, was one was pronouncing the name with the umlaut and the other without the umlaut.
Another problem is the over simplification of a location. For instance, my grandfather was born and raised in Heber, Soltaukreiss or Soltau-Fallingbostel, Niedersachsen, Prussia. Geni simplifies the location by not even allowing for the name of the village, and there are many thousands of villages in Germany, which are completely ignored by this automatic over simplification of address. How can you possibly know which church would have the record you're looking for if you don't know what village the church is located in? Almost all of my Niedersachsen addresses are simplified to Schneverdingen, which by German standards, is some distance from Heber and Trauen, where my mother grew up.
My point is, these little things can cause a tremendous amount of confusion in making correct connections and finding the documents for producing the correct history and connections. Newcomers can't possibly anticipate the cultural and historical changes if they have no solid reference point to work with. Even old timers to family history find such over simplification and inaccuracies extremely frustrating.
If you want to build a genuine one world family tree, you have to find a better way to keep unnecessary inaccuracies out of it. Providing historical maps is one option which would be a lot of help. Historical articles or links to historical articles on the more transitional areas might also be a big help, as long as they're not too lengthy for those who don't like to take the time to read. Such countries as Germany and Italy, which were slower in developing as nations, would be key areas to start with. At some point, even pronunciation keys for the various languages would be helpful. Most of all, lists of changes in names of places through time and a list of where to go for information during those political changes would be extremely helpful. The very most helpful thing in places of events is to not make it so very difficult to enter a very specific location, and change your automatic conversion of dates to the more internationally understood dating system.
I hope this can be of some help for the greater accuracy and ease of building a one world family tree. Please consider them.
Sincerely,
Sylvia M. Hertel
Lead, S.D., USA
