New York Times article

You have a wonderful cousin writing for the Times, AJ. The article is great. Is the photo the corner of CPW & 72nd?

Congrats on the article Unknown Profile.

Happy Mother's Day to you and yours as well.

Congratulations. I shared the article on my Facebook page!

Will Elon Musk be there?

"Familysearch.org, for example, has stitched together tens of thousands of user-contributed family trees from around the world. The single-largest tree contains 240 million people;"

Where did they get that? I know there was a dump of 240 million names back in 2000, but that is not a single tree like our world tree, right? I call BS.

You know what Jeff, I can't find any publicity online for that "The single-largest tree contains 240 million people .."

Maybe there's a press kit from FamilySearch?

The closest I see is a comment on this blog post:

http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/02/myheritage-searches-for-familys...

"A huge number of the 835,921,086 entries in Family Search Family Tree are duplicates (more or less, with varying errors of many types)."

I tried to contact Alex Williams via Email on the NYT website to ask for the source for this statement, but I just get "We could not process your request, please try again later. Sorry for inconvenience."

Maybe A.J. could ask him. I expect he is confusing the 240 million names (data set) with being a "single tree". That is not even close to the same thing as what we have on Geni and WikiTree.

As of 11 May 2015:

Our tree includes 9,853,722 people
http://www.wikitree.com/

Profiles connected by Geni's world family tree: 91,419,752
http://www.geni.com/worldfamilytree

I wondered about that too!

As far as I'm aware Geni has the largest single tree.

Unknown Profile, can you find out where Alex Williams got the 240 million single-tree figure for FamilySearch and perhaps have him correct it online. It currently reads like FamilySearch has the largest tree at more than 2.5 times the size of Geni.

Corrections to the New York Times can be submitted directly.
ie. http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/corrections/

Hey guys. Sorry, I was offline there.
The Family Search info came directly from Family Search PR. The reporter verified it.
FS has about 1.1 billion profiles on their tree, and 240 million of them are connected on a single tree.
The big challenge for them is that it's not yet as easy to search connections between two people on the tree, as it is with Geni.
Does that help at all?

Why isn't it easily findable online like Geni & Wikitree stats are? Because it's not ready for wide release (software development).

Unknown Profile can speak to this. My understanding is that the FamilySearch tree is not fully merged. In other words, it is the same as if you said that all the MyHeritage Trees were connected by confirmed SmartMatches. Not really comparable to the curated World Family Tree on Geni.

Randy - good analogy, and makes sense. In fact I'd be skeptical if FS takes the same "connected" approach. Rather they have units such as their community trees projects & historical royalty projects, with records and trees available to use within those projects.