IAJGS 2024 Conference Recap

We’re back from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where we had the opportunity to attend the 44th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. The conference was held August 18-22 in the City of Brotherly Love.

The exhibit hall was open for the entire conference and attendees made good use of their time visiting the Geni table. We were happy to grant extended walkthroughs of the website to help users better understand how they can make use of all of Geni’s powerful features. Several times we were even able to connect new users to the World Family Tree within just three generations! We loved hearing from long-time users who let us know how much they have enjoyed using Geni to share their family history and collaborate with relatives.

We are grateful to Geni Curator Benjamin Schoenbrun, who volunteered some of his time to sit with attendees at the Geni table to help users with their trees.

Curator Randy Schoenberg held a Birds of a Feather for Geni users. After relocating to the tables in the exhibit hall, Randy brought the entire group over to say hello at the Geni table.

For this conference, we removed the limitations on the Geni Pathfinder and expanded it to find any blood or in-law path between two people. Geni users who registered on the Pathfinder event page received a notification if a new relationship was found to another attendee. Many people had a lot of fun with these paths and even made new discoveries! Thanks to an in-law path, a very happy user discovered that her husband was a blood relative of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.

One of the best parts of going to genealogy conferences is the opportunity to see Geni Curators in person. It’s always a really fun time when we can get together for our Geni Curator dinners. We were lucky to be joined by local curators too!

We had an amazing time in Philadelphia and we can’t wait to see everyone next year in Fort Wayne, Indiana!