Easy Genealogy Research Logging with Goldie May

Did you know you can have an automatic research log with Goldie May? Goldie May is a genealogy research assistant tool created by Richard Miller available for Chrome and Firefox. Essentially it is a browser extension that opens a sidebar to help you log your research-in-progress. The research log tool in Goldie May helps you manage projects and logs websites you visit. Not only does it create an automatic research log for you, tracking the sites you’ve visited, but it can also save screenshots to your research log. You can even export your research log to a .csv file that you can then use in Excel or Airtable. There are many neat features of Goldie May, but in this blog post, I’ll focus on the free research log tool, and the citations features in the Pro subscription.

We’ve talked about previous versions of Goldie May in past blog posts and podcast episodes. Richard is always adding more features to Goldie May, so I wanted to share them. Here are the past posts:

How to Research Like a Pro with Goldie May

RLP 90: Goldie May – Research Assistant and Log

RLP 218: Goldie May Subway Map with Richard Miller

Automated Source Citation Builders – mentions Goldie May’s automatic citation feature in the Pro subscription

Goldie May YouTube Channel:

When I went on Richard’s series, Unrehearsed Genealogy Research, we worked on my research about Clement Darnold. I needed to find evidence that Clement’s mother was Francis Noland as part of a larger DNA proof argument. The Unrehearsed Genealogy Research series is not about the Goldie May tool, but I did turn on the Goldie May automatic research logging before starting that project. So, in this post, I’ll show screenshots from my Clement Darnold Goldie May research log.

How to use the Goldie May Research Log

Requirements: Chrome or Firefox browser, and a free FamilySearch account

Download: Goldie May at the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Store

Open the Goldie May sidebar by clicking on your Chrome or Firefox browser extension button, and sign in with your FamilySearch account.

To get started, create a new project. Click Projects and then click +New Project. Add the research question or subject of your log. I added “Was Francis Noland/Knowling the mother of Clement Darnold?” Then in the notes section, you can more info. I added the unique identifiers for this research objective: Clement was born 15 Sep 1808 and died 17 Dec 1872 and was buried Carroll County, Kentucky. He married Drusilla Henry on 23 July 1832 in Gallatin Co., KY. It isn’t required, but you can also link a person from the FamilySearch Family Tree to your project in the People section. Simply copy and paste their ID number to add them. I added Clement, but I could also add his hypothesized mother, Francis Noland.

Under the title of your project are five of the tools in Goldie May:

We are going to focus on the second tool, the Research Log, in this post. However the other tools are also great. Some tools are part of the Plus ($12/month) and Pro ($24/month) subscriptions of Goldie May, but the research log is free.

One Click Logging and Automatic Logging

To log a page, simply navigate to the page you want to log, and click the “Log Page” button on the Goldie May sidebar. To log every site you visit, simply toggle on the Automatic Logging button. When you log a search, it appears with the date, title of the website and the URL in your list of entries. You can add to the entry by using the icons below the entry:

I searched a Baptist church membership book from Henry County Kentucky, for the surname Darnold, and it came back with no results. I clicked “log page,” and the title of the book and the URL were added to the log. I clicked the thumbs down to indicate a negative result. You can also add a summary of your results in the abstract/summary box. I wrote a little about my search and the book: “List of names included, but OCR search did not detect the Darnold surname. No index. 25 pages.”

To add a citation, click the bookmark icon and type your citation.

Differentiating Content and Added Remarks

If you want to comment on the findings, you can use the comment dialog icon to type your thoughts. This is a great feature of the research log because it helps you follow standard #26 from Genealogy Standards. This standard, called “Distinction between content and comments,” requires genealogists to keep what the record says and their own comments about it separate. In Goldie May, you can put what the record says in the abstract/summary, and put your own thoughts about it in the comments.

In my entry for William Darnell in the Kentucky Tax books, I extracted William’s line in the abstract box, then I made a comment below that that has my thoughts about what it means.

Using the Research Log to Go Back to a Record

Going to the research log tool, I can see all the web pages I visited during my episodes of Unrehearsed Research about Clement Darnold. To quickly get back to any of the websites you visited, just click on the URL and it opens in a new tab in your Chrome or Firefox browser.

Adding Screenshots

A new feature of Goldie May that you may not have tried yet is the screenshot feature. You can simply right click (cmd+click for Mac) and you’ll see the Goldie May symbol next to “take a screenshot.” When you take a screenshot, the image you snip is automatically saved to your research log, nested with the page title and URL!

Step 1: right click (cmd+click for Mac) and choose “take a screenshot”

Step 2: Using the crosshairs that appear, select part of your screen – within the yellow will be the screenshot.

Step 3: That’s it! You can now see the screenshot in your log, nested under the 1830 census for Francis Darnold that was already in the log. You can take several screenshots, and they will also appear in the same entry. You can also see that I visited that page five times now.

When you click on the screenshot, it enlarges. You can copy and paste it elsewhere, or expand the Goldie May sidebar to fill your whole screen to see it better.

Citations

In the Goldie May research log, there is a spot for you to write a citation. You can copy and paste the citation from FamilySearch for indexed records (and you’ll probably need to update the access date), or you can write your own citation. This text box allows you to have italicized text by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+i.

I wrote my own citation for this tax book image from a browse-only collection:

Pro Plan Citation Features

In the Pro plan of Goldie May, there are some additional helps available for citations. One of them is an autocomplete feature, like auto-complete in text messages. Webpage information and transcribed information from the record is available to you in a dropdown box as you start typing. For example, instead of having to copy and paste the URL, you can just type URL, and then a drop-down box appears and you can select which URL you’d like – the full URL, a shortened version (permalink without other parameters), or the origin (main site URL). To see the auto-complete options, start typing fields that are transcribed on the record transcription webpage, like or “dwelling” and you’ll see the dwelling number. Finish typing the word dwelling, press enter, then the dwelling number is added for you. You can also type “today” for the access date, “type” for database with images or images, “website” for FamilySearch, and so forth.

Another Pro citation feature is adding automatic citations in the research log. Goldie May will automatically grab the citations from Ancestry and FamilySearch and keep them in your automatic log. The citations at both sites are not perfect, but I like the FamilySearch citations much better than Ancestry. So here’s what the automatic citation looks like at FamilySearch:

You’ll notice the access date is not today’s date, but the date the collection was added to FamilySearch – for this example, I searched on 15 Feb 2024, and the date following the URL is 27 July 2019. To fix this, you can easily edit the automatic citation in the log by typing “today” and selecting the autocomplete date, then click save.

Watch Richard’s video about auto-complete citations here: Citations, easy like text messages: a new Pro feature.

Sign up for Goldie May

To sign up for Goldie May, use the following link: https://www.goldiemay.com/familylocket. We are Goldie May affiliates, so we receive a portion of the income from this affiliate link. We hope Goldie May helps you with your journey to research like a pro!

Easy Genealogy Research Logging with Goldie May