Rabbit Holes With Randy - Subway Maps on Goldie May, Your Genealogy Research Assistant

This week's Rabbit Hole was exploring Goldie May - a Chrome extension that works with FamilySearch Family Tree and Ancestry Member Trees to help you perform your genealogy research and analysis work.  

1)  The website looks like this:

There are two buttons on this first screen - to "Install Goldie May for Free" and to "Watch a 90-second Demo."  Please watch the video - it's worth your while.  If you click on the "Install Goldie May" link, you can download the program/app to your Chrome browser.  There is also a description of the program/app.  

Further down the Goldie May web page are descriptions of the available features:

2)  The features currently available include:

*  Automatic Research Log: One-click logging. Or automatic logging if you please. Save screenshots. Write notes and abstracts. Search and filter. Export to CSV.

*  Subway Maps: A magical new timeline tool. Check the consistency of your work, find problem areas, and zero-in on new records

*  Workspace Management:  Too many tabs and windows? Take a snapshot. Then later, restore to their previous place on the screen, just where you left off.

*  Canvas:  A new visual look at your screenshots. Move, zoom, and group screenshots like papers on a table.

*  Citations:  Instant FamilySearch and Ancestry citations. No more copy and paste. Edit as you please. Export any time.

*  Locality Research:  Quickly jump to place resources on the FamilySearch Wiki, The Family History Guide, and Google Maps.

*  Research Planning:  Deep dive into the catalogs of FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast, and WorldCat. Save interesting collections to your task list.

*  Faster Searching:  Collection Hints for the time and place your ancestor lived. Search every census during their lifetime. Jump between decades.

There is a Goldie May YouTube channel  where Goldie May creator Richard Miller and geneablogger James Tanner demonstrate the program features.  

3)  Goldie May is not totally free to use.  Here are the subscription options available:

NOTE:  There are camera icons on some of the features above - there are Demo videos for these features.  This is still a work in progress!

4)  I have only explored the "Subway Map" feature to date, and plan to at least test drive the other features.

To use the "Subway Map" with FamilySearch Family Tree:

*  Open FamilySearch Family Tree to the Person page for your target person.

*  Click on the Goldie May Chrome extension on your browser.  

*  Select "Subway Map" from the menu.  The "Subway Map" shows you, in graphical form, where the target person resided over time, according to the Events (Vitals and Other Information) for the Person in the FamilySearch Family Tree profile.  The places are on the left-hand scale, while the years are on the bottom scale.  

*  Below the graph is the legend for the graph showing which persons in the target persons family are shown.  You can select parents, spouses, and/or children from the list provided and the lines for those other persons are added to the Subway Map with different colors.

*  You can go full screen or half screen with the Goldie May window.

5)  Here are some of my attempts to make Subway Maps.  Initially, I chose my great-grandfather, Thomas Richmond (1848-1917) as my target person.  Here is my first "Subway Map:"

If you run your mouse over any of the circles on the chart, you can see the Fact or Event name.  For Thomas, I can see, in a chart, that he was born and baptized in Wiltshire, England in 1848, came to the USA in 1856 at New York, and lived in Providence County, Rhode Island, Windham County, Connecticut, New London County, Connecticut, Washington County, Rhode Island, and Worcester County, Massachusetts.  The user can select the place details to show - I selected County, State, Country.

I expanded the Goldie May window to full screen, and then selected James Richman (1821-1912) as the target person, and selected his wife, Hannah Rich (1824-1911) and his parents John Richman (1789-1867) and Ann Marshman (1784-1856) and saw:

I added the legend on the right to the screen shot of the graph so I could see what the colors are.  

I experimented some more, and using my presentation program, snipping tool and reducing the size of the graph a bit, I could get the graph and the legend side-by-side (I'm sure there are better ways to do this) to produce this three-generation chart of my great-grandmother Georgianna Kemp (1868-1952), her parents  James Abraham Kemp (1831-1902) and Mary Jane Sovereen (1840-1874), her husband Charles Auble (1849-1916) and her daughter, Emily Kemp Auble (1899-1977):

I took this screen shot with my mouse over the 1861 Marriage Fact for her parents.  

If you pick too many persons to show (for example, target person, parents, spouse and 10 children) you will get a jumble on the left scale that is not readable.  

6)  I haven't tried this yet with my Ancestry Member Tree.  I imagine the results will be similar.

Time for this bunny to find his carrots and get some energy for more exploring this rabbit hole. 

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Disclosure:  After registering for the Goldie May website, I was offered a complimentary Pro subscription to the site, which I greatly appreciate.  However, my objective reporting will not be affected by that.

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Copyright (c) 2022, Randall J. Seaver

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