Name Clouds and Duplicates from the GenusTree App

One of the benefits of looking at new computer programs (or apps as they are now called) is that once and while you find something interesting and occasionally, a program will "stick." What I mean by that is that the program becomes one that you depend upon for information or use as a tool. Since I am not usually in the "review" mode, I don't usually make evaluations of programs but I do talk about new ones and highlight their features. I have been going through the now 107 apps on the FamilySearch.org App Gallery and picking some to highlight.

GenusTree is described as follows:

Get to know your ancestors in the context of their entire family, not just isolated parent child relationships. Visualize your family in new ways. Have fun with facts and statistics about your family tree.  

Features

• Isolate and see a single generation without moving up and down your tree.
• Create dynamic and graphical name trees to show what names are in your tree and how often they occur.
• Find duplicates to cut down on duplicate research.
• See your family lines plotted on a world map.
• Completely free.
• No Ads.
• Users can submit feedback to request new features in the app.

 The startup screen for the program is pretty spare:

There does not seem to be any information about the app, as such. The first option is the name cloud that appears at the beginning of this post. Name clouds were the rage a few years ago, but have moved into the background of postings online. They are still interesting.

The second option is to "Find Duplicates." This turns out to be a rather unsophisticated list of matching names and could be useful but really is not. This could be a problem if the user tried to merge the people based on this matching.

Matching people with the same name and different birth dates is not useful.

The last feature, "Find Generation," has no instructions and was supposed to find all my cousins. I have hundreds (thousands?) of cousins but the program only shows about five.

This app is a good start, but not awfully useful.