Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is an interview with Richard Miller, developer of the Goldie May research assistant application. He shares a new feature with us called the subway map. This tool is a timeline graph showing locations on the y-axis and times on the x-axis. It helps you see migration over time, spot errors, compare migrations of family members and FAN club members, and more.
Transcript
Nicole (3s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 218 Goldie May Subway map with Richard Miller. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.
Nicole (42s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. All right. Hi everyone. And welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?
Nicole (50s):
Great. And I’ve been doing a lot of work on my portfolio in the last week. That’s always like a, a good feeling to make progress on that. How about you?
Diana (58s):
Oh my goodness. I have just been having so much fun, exploring lots of different things. One of them is the new family search images, or I shouldn’t say the new family search images because that has been around for a couple of years, but I went to a family search influencers meeting a week or two ago, and they were telling us more about the future of the family search, catalog and images. And so it really made me dig in and learn more about it. Plus we had a client project where it was really key because these images that basically solved the research question had not been added to the catalog and they were out there on images, but it was a little difficult to find them.
Diana (1m 43s):
And this was for an archive in Poland and literally they put up all of their church records. So it was amazing, but it was not easy to use and not easy to find. So I did end up writing a blog post about that. Maybe we’ll talk about that in a future episode, but it has been fun just trying to understand the ins and outs and basically think of images as just this huge collection of research. And you have to be really dedicated to finding your record because it’s not always easy. So anyway, that’s been fun. Family search is doing so much to help the Genealogy community, and I appreciate everything they’re doing, but it is up to us learn how to use it better, which will be fun, cuz we’re kind of talking about some of that today in our episode.
Nicole (2m 32s):
Yeah. That’ll be great with the family search images that aren’t added to the catalog. It seems like that’s because the camera operators are taking those photos like right away, you know, in the last week or something and they haven’t been cataloged yet. Is that right?
Diana (2m 50s):
So the system is set up just to immediately upload any of you go to explore historical images on family search. You will see they have a running number of how many images are being added and it it’s always going every second. There’s a new set of images being added. So the catalogers can’t keep up. Basically it’s just so much work. It’s more, it’s difficult. And so they are looking at trying to figure out how to update the catalog. You know, that catalog system is old and we love it, but it is old. And so they’re looking at doing an update, making this all work together a little bit more seamlessly.
Diana (3m 31s):
And so, you know, that was part of the meeting asking for feedback from those of us who teach all about the catalog and work in it professionally as well as just for our own personal use, you know, because they realize they need to make this accessible and make it as useful for us as possible. So anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing what the updates will be. It won’t be for a while. It’s down the road a bit, but it’s out there in our future.
Nicole (3m 57s):
Good to know that’s coming. And I’m so grateful for all of the images, family search posts.
Diana (4m 2s):
Yeah. Well, let’s do our announcements. We will have our Research Like a Pro of DNA study group starting in the spring of 2023. And registration will begin December 1st. So put that on your calendar. If you’re excited to be involved in the next DNA study group, it really is an amazing way to get started on your DNA journey. So we’ve had so many people go through it and it’s been so fun. And we’re looking forward to doing that again in the spring. And if you’ve already been through the program or you’ve done maybe done the eCourse or work through a project on your own using our Research Like a Pro DNA book, feel free to apply to be a peer group leader.
Diana (4m 45s):
You get free registration and you get to work with others. That’s really a fun opportunity as well. And then as always join our newsletter for new articles, updates sales on our courses and see what’s going on with this.
Nicole (5m 0s):
Thank you. Well, we’re excited today to have a guest. Richard Miller is here. Hi Richard. Hey,
2 (5m 7s):
How are you?
Nicole (5m 8s):
Fantastic. How are you? Good.
2 (5m 10s):
Thank you.
Nicole (5m 11s):
Richard is an amazing software developer who builds tools and apps for helping with Genealogy research. And we’ve had him on the podcast before to talk about Goldie May a Genealogy research app. And his background is in tech. He has previously worked in tech roles at three Genealogy companies, but then after that, he started doing his own family history research, which opened his eyes. And he’s building Goldie May to be the app that he wants for his own research. And then he hopes other people will find it useful as well. So we’re excited to have Richard here again today to tell us a little bit more about some new features that he’s been working on.
Diana (5m 50s):
All right. Well let’s just jump right in Richard. Can you tell us a little bit more about Goldie May? It was so fun to talk about that in our previous episode and we had a lot of listeners reply and tell us they were super excited about the app, so we’re excited to revisit it. And I think we’re gonna talk about a new feature that goes with this, but maybe just give us like a little bit of background about Goldie May.
2 (6m 15s):
Yeah. Well Thank you for that intro to both of you and you’re right. I I’d worked at Genealogy companies before, but wasn’t doing my own Genealogy research at the time. So it’s amazing how, you know, it’s much easier to work on this when I’m doing it myself. And so yeah, I built Goldie May to be kind of a research assistant and you install it in your browser and it opens up this little side window. So off to the side of your family search window or your ancestry window, you have Goldie May in another window and it, I’m trying to think of it as an assistant. That’s helping you with your research. So it’s not another place to put your family tree. It’s trying to be a place for your work in progress.
2 (6m 55s):
So it helps you, as you’re thinking about your work, organizing it, understanding what you’re seeing. And then once you’ve come to a conclusion about something, then you’re gonna put that back into the family search tree or your ancestry tree. So I really do want it to be a place for your work in progress and assistant helping you along the way. So yeah, when we met last time, I think that was all kind of the goal back then when we talked in our last podcast. But since then I’ve launched the Subway map, which is Goldie May’s timeline tool. So yeah, I thought we could talk about the Subway map today and go over what that is.
Diana (7m 32s):
All right. Well, I am really excited about that and I love that you are melding that technology background with your love of Genealogy. I think that’s such a perfect thing because we have to use technology in our Genealogy today and it’s just really neat to have new tools and new things to use. And especially with, you know, you’ve built your tools to work with family search and ancestry, which are, in my opinion too, are the most useful because of how many records they have. So that’s really great.
2 (8m 5s):
Yeah. And, and you’re right. I’ve needed to learn more Genealogy lately. And I remember just, you know, opening my podcast app and searching for podcasts and yours was one that I found early on and started listening to from episode one. So I I’ve appreciated your teaching along the way, cuz I’ve learned a lot as well from you.
Diana (8m 21s):
Well, that’s been so fun because we kind of have been building our businesses side by side, you know, from those years ago that we kind of first met. So that’s great. Yeah.
Nicole (8m 31s):
Great. Well, let’s talk about the Subway map feature. Tell us kind of the basics of what this can do.
2 (8m 38s):
Yeah. Okay. So the Subway map is called that because it vaguely looks like a Subway map when you see it. Yeah. So it’s Goldie Mae’s timeline tool. It’s more of a workhorse than a showhorse. So it’s not something you would necessarily print and put on the wall because it’s super pretty, but it’s intended to be really insightful hopefully. And it’s supposed to be quick to use. So as you’re browsing your family search tree or ancestry tree in that left side window, your main window, the Subway map can just redraw instantly to show you a timeline view of what you’re looking at in your tree. You know, we’ll do our best here to describe and talk about a visual tool that we are talking about with our voices.
2 (9m 19s):
But if you could imagine getting out a piece of graph paper and along the bottom, we’re gonna put the years of the Ancestors life. So you could think about an ancestor or think about your own life. You’re gonna draw out years along the bottom of this piece of graph paper. And then along the left side, we’re gonna draw all the places where this ancestor lived. So, you know, a typical ancestor might live in five to six places. Maybe that’s one or two countries and a few states and maybe a few more counties than that, but maybe it’s five to six generally. So you have these five or six places along the left side of your graph paper. And then we’re gonna draw a line from the time and place where they were born to the next time and place where we know they lived to the next place to the next place until the final.
2 (10m 4s):
You know, if we have their death place and time, then we’re gonna draw the line out to there. So then you get this kind of line that generally goes down because you’re going from the places they first live down to the places they later lived. So you get this kind of stair step down line, but you end up seeing really interesting patterns in the places because as we’re doing Genealogy research, we wanna have a consistent story about the places where someone lived. And so if they’re bouncing all over the place or the line zigzags back, it can be the sign that there’s a problem. So, you know, if you’re doing this exercise on graph paper for yourself, you know, where you lived for the whole, the course of the entire line, right? But if you’re looking at an ancestor, we don’t know everywhere they live.
2 (10m 46s):
We, we know certain points where, you know, we might have a birth record. We might have a certain census record, but we’re missing other census records. So as you’re looking at the Goldie May Subway map, you’ll see the line go diagonal sometimes. And when you see a diagonal line, that means that you’re jumping from a certain time in place to say 10 years later at a different place. And we don’t know where the person was in between. So whenever you see a diagonal line on the Subway map, you’re saying to yourself, okay, wait, were they in the first place or the second place during those intervening years between those two spots. And so whenever you see diagonal line, you can say, okay, I need to do more research and hopefully fill in the gaps. So I know where they were during that intervening time, the data’s coming from your family search ancestry tree.
2 (11m 32s):
So it’s using the, the vital facts from the tree it’s using the residence places you have, but uniquely it’s also using the childbirths. So if you’re looking at say a woman, it will also include her children’s birthplaces and times in her Subway map. And that goes to a point from James Tanner, where he says the first rule of Genealogy is that when the baby was born, the mother was present. And so we, we have to necessarily include the mother’s childbirths in her timeline, even if they weren’t kind of explicitly put in as residence, places for her, because she was there for those birth places. So when you include the childbirths in this line, you end up sometimes seeing a really crazy zigzag.
2 (12m 16s):
Like I have an ancestor where when you look at his children, it shows him and his wife having children in the UK, then in New York, then the UK, then New York, UK, and New York. So you get the zigzag back and forth, and this was early 18 hundreds. So you immediately think to yourself, wait a second. You know, this couple was not going back and forth across the Atlantic to have these children. There’s probably a problem in the data. And what it is is there’s probably two families merged together into this profile. And you’re looking at one family, a Wilson family that lived in the UK, but really a separate Wilson family that lived in New York and someone has accidentally merged those children together.
2 (12m 57s):
And so you instantly see that with the Subway map because you see that zigzag line and you think to yourself, okay, this can’t be, this can’t be right. Something must be going on. So that kind of insight is what I’m hoping to bring with the Subway map because you can instantly see problems and at least verify the story of what’s going on. If that makes sense.
Nicole (13m 14s):
That does make sense. And I’m looking at a Subway map for one of my Ancestors right now, and it does zigzag back and forth with the childbirths, but they’re all within different counties in Texas. So I guess it could be possible, but it probably also indicates that maybe we Don don’t know exactly where the children were born and they didn’t really know, especially if the family was migrating a lot in the 18 hundreds in Texas, you know?
2 (13m 40s):
Yeah. So that’s, that’s a great point. And at the bottom left of the Subway map, there’s this place where you can change the precision level. So if you’re looking at counties, you can switch to states and maybe if you switch to state mode, you’ll see just kind of a flat line, meaning it’s all in Texas, but you can just switch that around and, and look for insights. So if maybe if you switch to the county and you see that zigzag, then yeah, you’ll wanna verify are these counties that are close to each other or not close to each other. And you know, oftentimes you know where places are, but you know, if you’re a us resident, you probably know generally where the states are. If you go down to the bottom left, there’s a button that says map the places. And when you open that, you click that link. It will open up those counties of Texas into a Google map.
2 (14m 22s):
So then you can see, you know, you can do driving directions if you want and say, okay, these counties are really close together. So that would make a lot of sense for the children to be born in these different counties maybe, or the counties are really far apart in Texas. So maybe there’s a problem here. And I need to look into this to see if it really matches. And you know, again, it could be right that those counties, there’s a reason the family moved and they moved back or whatever, but you at least wanna verify because normally you’d expect people to have a consistent place over time because it’s hard to move and it it’s, you know, the farther back you go, the more likely you were born and lived and died in the same place. And it’s probably more, you know, it’s really just recently in the last a hundred years or less that we can move around so easily and migrate anywhere we
Nicole (15m 7s):
Want. Absolutely. I love the map feature. I just clicked on that. And now it’s showing me how far apart these counties are, and this is really cool, Richard. This is awesome.
2 (15m 17s):
Oh, thanks. Good. Yeah. Does it, and what do you think are those counties far apart or close? Does it make sense for them to be in those separate counties? Two
Nicole (15m 24s):
Of the counties are really close. We have vans, ant county and Johnson county, which are really kind of suburbs of Dallas. And why is county, which is north of Dallas. So most of those in Colin county. So they’re all kind of like surrounding Dallas.
2 (15m 37s):
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Nicole (15m 39s):
So I wonder if part of it could be boundary changes too.
2 (15m 43s):
Yeah,
Nicole (15m 43s):
That’s right. Could be, or just new counties being created, but it was toward the end of the 18 hundreds. And I think by the end of the 18 hundreds, the counties in Texas were more stable. So I I’d have to check that, but that’s a really helpful and just efficient way to view the places where the children were born. And it’s such a good idea to add the children’s birthplaces
2 (16m 3s):
There. Oh, thanks. Yeah. And the mapping too. Yeah. I think when I’ve done research in England, you know, I don’t know the English places very well, so it helps so much to open that up and say, okay, these are, these are areas that are close to far apart. That ends up helping a lot for areas. I don’t know. I talked about these diagonal lines. You might see sometimes where you have this ambiguity in the sources. And, you know, I had an ancestor that was like in Denmark and then nine years later, she’s in Utah and we don’t know where she was during those nine years. Well, there’s an option to turn on hints. So you, you choose show hints. And the, and these little gold dots appear and they, they are collections that may apply to your ancestor.
2 (16m 44s):
So in the case of the, my Danish ancestor, this was a case where a gold dot appeared that said, you know, she might be in the 1850 us census and there was no record of that yet on the tree. So the hint is saying, please go look in the 1850 census. And if you click the gold dot, then click on family search. It launches a search into the 1850 census on family search. So now you’re no longer searching all the family search you’re searching for her, just in the 1850 census. In the case of the hints, there was also an 18, I think it was 1855 Denmark census. So if I could find her in the 1850 us census or the 1855 Denmark census, I would know where she was for a lot, you know, a lot more of those nine years.
2 (17m 27s):
And So that the task is to, you know, find her in one of those collections that helps flatten out the line. So we know where she was. So that’s of course, really easy to remember for the us census. We can remember it’s every decade on the, you know, the zero decade, the UK is easy because it’s on that first year of the decade, but then something like the Denmark census, I Don don’t remember when all of those. So I put all of them into Goldie May. So if I’m doing Danish research, I instantly see all the options to search the Danish censuses over time. And, you know, they’re, they’re really random. There’s sometimes there every five years, sometimes they’re farther apart, but the Goldie May Subway map hints have UK, Canada, Denmark, Norway.
2 (18m 9s):
I recently put in all the departments of France. Those were, those are pretty varied. They’re different years for different departments of France. So those all are in there. You know, for a while, I just left out the 1890 us census because, you know, it was burned. Most of it was gone. It, it generally doesn’t apply. But I recently put that back in for the 19 counties that it applies to. So there’s, you know, just the four or five or six states in 19 counties within those states that do have an 1890 census. And so if your Ancestors happens to be living in one of those counties, then it will hint that to you to say, Hey, go check the 1890 census because they might be in there. So you’ll see that if you’re, you know, if you just keep hints on, as you’re using the Subway map, you’ll just randomly see those appear sometimes.
2 (18m 55s):
And, and, and at least for me, I go, oh yeah, I didn’t know. There’s a, you know, 1845 Illinois census or 1835 Illinois census. So it’ll just remind you to check those censuses that are available and make sure you’ve kind of really found all the data that you can within those census collections,
Nicole (19m 10s):
How wonderful the hint feature is great. And I just turned that on for one of my people I’m looking at, and it’s Eliza Jane Weatherford, and she lived until 1921 and, you know, we have her death place, but then we are missing kind of one of those in between censuses, from, you know, when she lived in Benton, Missouri to where she, you know, in 1900, then she died in a different part of Missouri. And So that, that little gold dot there that hint for those in between years could help us define when she moved to that different part of Missouri. So that’s kind of cool.
2 (19m 47s):
Yeah. Good. That’s cool to hear.
Diana (19m 49s):
Well, I’ve been having fun playing with it as we’ve been talking. And I agree, this is just such a fun way to look at your family’s timeline and look at it with a view to location. So I did wanna back up just a little bit and let our listeners know how to get Goldie May. And so you can go to Richard’s website, which is Goldie May, it’s spelled G O L D I E M a Y, and we’ll have a link to it in the show notes. But then when you click on that, you will see very easily a button to click on to get the extension. And it’s a Chrome extension. It shows up, you know, where all your extensions show up with a little G.
Diana (20m 29s):
And when you go to a person on family search or on ancestry, and you click that little G, then it pulls up all the Goldie made tools. And one is a research Log, which we talked about last time. And then another is a Subway map. And then there are several other tools that we won’t talk about today, but I I’m sure you are working on developing even more things, right,
2 (20m 51s):
Richard? Yeah, that’s right. There is more coming for roots tech. So that’s in the pipeline right now and yeah, thanks for mentioning the install process. So yeah, there are several free tools. And then there are other tools that are available with a Goldie May subscription. And this was a good time actually, to talk with you all about the Subway map because the Subway map had been in the past the subscription product, but I recently made it so everyone can use the Subway map five times per month for free. So even if you’re not a Goldie May subscriber, you can go in and choose five Ancestors. And then those five, you can use the Subway map on all month long. And then at the first of the month, you can go back and change the five to a different five and, and research with those.
2 (21m 34s):
So I’m hoping that gives everyone the opportunity to play with it and see if it’s helpful and, and see what research, you know, insights they might be able to get with it.
Diana (21m 41s):
Oh, that’s wonderful. Thanks for clarifying that perhaps just focus on one family and then use Goldie May for five people in that family to research for that month. So that kind of makes you focus in you can’t just be clicking around on everybody.
2 (21m 56s):
Yeah, that’s right.
Diana (21m 57s):
We’re all about focus. Well, one of the things I also wanted to mention when looking at the Subway map, you have these little dots and maybe you already said this, but I I’m, as I’m mounting around on it, I can see how nice it is. Every time you come to a little dot, it pulls up the event for that location. So I’m looking at my ancestor, John C. Harris, and I can see that the first event is his birth and then just easily scrolling down. I can see his residence and then there was a marriage and then there was a birth of children. So I love that. That is just right there. You can just scroll around and see what the event is right on the Subway map.
Diana (22m 37s):
I think that’s just amazing. And then I see the gold circles as well with some hints. And I can’t believe I don’t have ’em on the 1850 census on family search, cuz I have two hints for him. He would think I would have that attached already, but apparently I don’t. So
2 (22m 51s):
Yeah, as you hover over those points and you see the places under those points, those places, at least on the family search tree come from the places as they were entered. And on the other hand, the places that are off on the, the side, the, the Y axis, those are the places as they were standardized. So sometimes you see a big zigzag in the line because something was standardized wrong. So I’ve seen that before where, you know, it’s supposed to be Iowa, but somehow it gets standardized to, you know, New Zealand, something really far away. And you see a Huget that huge zigzag and you go wait a second. They didn’t live in New Zealand and you go back to the tree and you can see, okay, it was standardized to the wrong place.
2 (23m 33s):
I’ll fix that. And then the line flattens out and you get back to that normal thing you expect.
Diana (23m 38s):
Yeah, it’s, it’s a really good way to just really quickly see if everything is matching up and, you know, know one of our first steps in the Research Like a Pro process is that timeline. And, you know, we teach doing that by putting in the records and looking at it, but this is the exact same kind of thing with analyzing where people were at any point in time and, and why you know that, and it, it’s just very visual. I think it’s a great thing to kind of go hand in hand with that step of your research of looking to see what’s been done. And if things make sense or if you need to do some more research, it’s always good to have different ways because we all look at things differently.
Diana (24m 18s):
We all learn differently. And sometimes a new view helps us to see something that was hidden before. So I think that’s one of the strengths of this.
2 (24m 27s):
Yeah. Thanks for saying that. And, and I can see your point too, that there’s probably still a time and a place to, you know, write out a timeline because you get benefits from your thought process while you’re writing. So I can see it, you know, maybe there’s other times when you’re gonna wanna write out certain events or certain parts of the timeline, and then other times you’ll wanna just quickly see something generated for you like this. I, I certainly use this and I keep my Subway map open all the time as I’m researching and, and just always look back to it on the right side to help me see what’s going on.
Diana (24m 58s):
Yeah. That’s really neat. Well, we do a lot of work with building trees in our DNA work and we need to be pretty fast with that. And So I can see that this would be really helpful as you are looking at people and they are people you haven’t personally researched because they’re your DNA matches trees. And it can maybe really quickly give you some ideas about how accurate their tree is or what things are looking like on somebody you haven’t researched.
2 (25m 28s):
Yeah. That’s maybe a good time to mention too, that you can use the Subway map to compare people. So you could compare a husband and wife for example. And it, when you do that, sometimes you notice that the wife or the husband doesn’t have one of the white stops that the other one does and you say, oh, okay. You know, they just didn’t get tagged in the 1870 census or whatever it was. So you can go back and kind of fix a data issue like that. But you can also compare the same person on the family search tree to an ancestry tree. I have my Leonard Wilson ancestry. I could pull him up on ancestry and family search, compare the two lines side by side and then see, Hey, the family search tree has more data than the ancestry tree does.
2 (26m 9s):
And I wanna figure out the discrepancy or whatever that might be. And because ancestry has multiple public member trees, you can pull up, like you’re saying multiple ancestry trees side by side and say, okay, which of these ancestry trees is more accurate or has has the right data. You can pull up say four public member trees and, and you could use them as consensus. Maybe you don’t wanna do that cuz they might have copied each other wrongly. But if you were to look at, you know, four trees next to each other of the same person and say, Hey, these all kind of had the same data points except for this one outlier. Then maybe that’d be like the big question. I’m gonna go look at that outlier and see why they have it different or something like that.
Diana (26m 50s):
Oh, that’s a really wonderful feature. So obviously we can use Goldie May on other people’s trees on ancestry, not just our own. Yeah,
2 (26m 58s):
That’s right. Any ancestry, public member tree that you can pull up, if you can go to the profile page, not the tree page, but go into the profile of an individual person. You’ll see the Subway map drawn for that person on the right. And then as you go to additional people, you’ll see additional lines drawn for each person.
Diana (27m 18s):
Nice. Well, what are some other things that we can do with the Subway map?
2 (27m 23s):
One other thing you’ll like is if you’re looking at the right side where the name, the places are all listed, you can hover over any of the place names and get several contextual Links for those. So say you’re in those counties of Texas that Nicole mentioned before you can hover over a county name and it will bring up a link to the family search Wiki for that county or the family search catalog for that county. So that allows you to just jump directly to that county’s resources without having to go to the catalog and you type in the county yourself. So it just allows you to quickly to jump to each of those things. And then the same goes for the states or the countries. If you’re working in a different country, then you can hover over that country’s name on the right side.
2 (28m 6s):
And you’ll see the ancestry card catalog for that country. Or my heritage is or find my past. It’s got all of those for the country level. There’s just a lot of resources. And so don’t miss the opportunity to hover over those place names in the left side to see if those can help you as well.
Diana (28m 21s):
Yeah, just by accident. I was hovering my mouth over those and they, I was like, what is this black box that keeps popping up? Oh yeah. And figured out these are resources. So that really is nice. And the thing I like about that is that it helps remind you. So you’ve got here is just one example. I’ve got, you know, this John Christian Harris lived in Indian territory in the early 19 hundreds. And so, you know, it’s showing me that there is information at all sorts of places, the family search Wiki catalog, the rec family search record finder, the research page, the ancestry card catalog, the family history guide.
Diana (29m 2s):
I mean so many places. And sometimes you forget about some other places you could go to get some help with your research. So that’s really nice. And yeah, I’m guessing have you had to go in and individually put in all these resources for, I mean obviously you have to, for every location.
2 (29m 20s):
Yeah. Some of them have patterns. So it wasn’t fortunately all one by one, some of ’em are easier than others, but yeah, there’s a, there’s kind of a pattern to the way they’re named in the Wiki or the catalog, et cetera.
Diana (29m 32s):
Okay. So this compare feature where you can compare husband and wife for parent and child. I just inadvertently got to comparing a, a parent and a child. And so now I have a blue and a green, how did I do that?
2 (29m 50s):
Are you on ancestry or a family search? I’m
Diana (29m 52s):
On ancestry.
2 (29m 53s):
As you’re navigating from person to person on ancestry, it will continue to pile on or accumulate the lines. Oh
Diana (29m 60s):
Wow. Okay. That’s neat. But it doesn’t do that on family search
2 (30m 3s):
On family search. It doesn’t accumulate like that. Instead. There’s a little person symbol next to the name down in the bottom. And if you click on the little person symbol, it will say, do you want to add this person’s parent or spouse or child?
Diana (30m 17s):
Oh, neat.
2 (30m 18s):
And that’s the way you do in a family search. That’s
Nicole (30m 20s):
How I’ve been doing it. I found that little button and I added in a man with both of his two wives, one died and then another one he married after the first wife died. And it’s pretty cool to see how the one wife’s timeline ends and then the places all line up for the second wife.
2 (30m 39s):
Oh, cool. Yeah, the husband. So your data must be pretty good there to show that kind of consistent story.
Nicole (30m 44s):
Yeah. It’s pretty good.
2 (30m 46s):
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. One thing I like to do on the family search side, because you can use that little person symbol is you could start with, you know, start with yourself or start with the grandparent and then add that person’s father or mother, and then keep going back with the father or mother the maternal line or the paternal line. And you can just kind of stack up four or five generations of one line. And then at that point, I like to turn off childbirths because with childbirths you’re, you’re saying to yourself, I’m assuming that the children attached to them and the tree are accurate. And so when a child was born, the mother’s present and, and so the children’s birth is an event for the mother, but if we’re actually wanting to look and test or not assume that the children and parent relationships are correct, we can turn that off, turn off childbirths.
2 (31m 33s):
And then you look at the line and you look for overlap between each generation. So, you know, you want your, your grandfather to have lived in the same time as your great-grandfather when, when the grandfather was a child. And then you want that person’s parent to have lived with them when they were a child and so on. So you want to have this, you want some consistency in the overlap of the lines going back. And So that method allows you to do that. So, and, and, you know, if you were using the five free per month, that’s a good exercise to do is start with one line and then just go back five names and keep stacking them up. So you can see a consistent line going back over the generations, at least in my tree, inevitably, you go back far enough. And the data starts to, to diverge a little bit or there, there just isn’t really good data that the generations necessarily overlap.
2 (32m 19s):
And So that can hint you. Okay. You know, at my, at the level of my third grade grandfather, that’s where I should really do some research to make sure that his father really is his father, because the data doesn’t quite show it yet.
Diana (32m 32s):
Well, I can just see so many applications to using this and it, it’s pretty easy. You’ve made it pretty, you know, as you’re clicking around to see it, but I think the real value will be in how we really use it to find new path for research or verifying our old research. So that that’s exciting. So what about doing some cluster fan club research? We talk a lot about that as a strategy to break down our brick walls, or we have really difficult Ancestors as we move further back,
2 (33m 2s):
This is a new area for me with the Subway map. But the way you could do that is if you were to pull up someone on ancestry, show their profile, then you’ll see the Subway map drawn for them. Then jump over to someone else who you think is in their fan club, who’s a friend or a neighbor or something, and you could pull them up on ancestry as well. And then their line will be drawn. That’s how you do it on ancestry. If you’re on family search, you know, you’re using that little person icon and you can’t add arbitrary people besides the immediate family. So the way you would do that is you go back into the Goldie Mae projects and you would create a new project and add the two people that you think are, you know, friends or associates or neighbors or whatever into one project.
2 (33m 43s):
And then when you choose that project in the Subway map, it will draw the line for those two people. Then you would see those two lines side by side, and then, and maybe that’s your way to say, okay, this person has a really unique name, so it’s easy to find their records. And so you could maybe see a consistent line over time for them. Whereas my ancestor that I’m searching has the common name, but he happens to be a friend or associate or neighbor of, of the first person. So maybe I can use the locations of the first person to help find my Ancestors, places and locations. So that’s how you would use it. You’d you’d place. You’d draw those two lines and see if one line can help you find insights for the second line.
Diana (34m 21s):
Oh, I love that. So this whole idea of a project is just another feature of Goldie. May. You could have one research objective and focus on a project for a person and then use all the different features, the Subway map, the Goldie May research Log, et cetera, to work on that project. So that’s nice.
2 (34m 41s):
Yeah. It keeps all the research organized for that particular thing. So you may have noticed too, that family search has a new person profile page. You’ve probably seen it offered to you. Do you want to turn on the new profile page and you can turn it on? And it, the color’s a little different and the style’s a little different, but I learned at education week a couple weeks ago that there’s a new thing called other relationships at the bottom of the profile page. So you can scroll down there and there’s a place to enter that for a given person that there’s another person who is, there’s a few relationship types, apprentice, employment, godparent, household neighbor, relative, and then for slavery, there’s a slaveholder and enslaved person.
2 (35m 21s):
So you can associate two profiles together and say that they have this relationship. That’s not a familial relationship, but it’s, it’s another relationship. And so long term, I would love for Goldie May to use that for the Subway map, let you turn on, you know, I want to turn on if you’re doing, doing, you know, African American research and you’re tracing back your line and you get to that point where we’re talking about the enslaved and a slaveholder, then you would possibly turn on the line there and then you’d be tracing back that enslave to see how those relationships line up. And if that helps you with your insights. So that’s long term, I would love to be able to offer that from that feature too.
Diana (35m 57s):
Oh, that is great. Thank you so much for talking about the new person page, because I have seen that pop up and I’ve just totally ignored it.
2 (36m 6s):
So yeah, like everything it takes getting used to, right. It’s just, it’s all there, but you know, as usual, whenever something changes, you kind of have to adjust your, your eyes to it. So, but yeah, it has, it has a cool new feature with that other relationship
Diana (36m 19s):
Thing. Oh my goodness. I am super excited about that because we work a lot with African American projects and be being able to add like a list of enslaved people from a slave schedule to a person that would just be amazing, or, you know, anyone listed in a probate or whatever, that would just be amazing. And I’m gonna throw this in here a little, little off topic, but having to do with African American research, I did learn that family search is working on this land and probate index. That’s out there, computer assisted indexing, and you’ll be able to use that for researching first names. So, you know, the enslaved people did not have last names in the records, but you can use it for researching by first name and locality and other keywords, like perhaps a slaveholder anyway.
Diana (37m 12s):
So that’s coming with family search, which is going to be amazing. And so this ability to connect people as well will be really helpful. So how exciting.
2 (37m 22s):
Yeah. It’s so nice that it’s on the tree and not just in your private notes So that everyone can benefit from that research.
Diana (37m 28s):
Yeah. Cuz we’ve struggled with that. What do we do with this information we find, where do we put it? And so we’ve always said family search needs to have a way that we can put that there because it’s so huge and so accessible to everyone. So that’s great.
2 (37m 42s):
Yeah.
Nicole (37m 43s):
Well, I love that new opportunity because there’s definitely some names to add to the family search tree from previous research. So that that’ll be really
2 (37m 51s):
Helpful. Yeah, for
Nicole (37m 53s):
Sure. Thanks Richard, for telling us about the Subway map, this is just a wonderful tool for fan club research, comparing profiles for just seeing quickly how a person migrated over time. I think it’ll be really useful for our listeners. So where can they go to learn a little bit more about Goldie May?
2 (38m 10s):
Yeah. Well Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it and they can go to Goldie May dot com. There’s a big gold button to install Goldie May for free and that puts it in your browser. And then you’ll go up to the top right of your browser under the little jigsaw puzzle and click the G. And that will open up Goldie May you’ll Log in with your family search account and then you’ll be connected. You’ll see that side window off to the side. And while Goldie May is accessed through a Chrome extension, the app really is in the cloud. So it’s not just on your computer where you’re gonna lose it. If your computer dies or something, your research is, is stored in the cloud. So if you Log out and Log back in from another computer, you can get to it easily. And you could do that at the library.
2 (38m 51s):
I sometimes just go to the library, install Goldie May in the browser Log in. I’ve got all my research there and I can use it at the library and then Log out and go home. So that’s one nice thing and yeah, I’d love to have people’s feedback if they try out the Subway map with those five names per month. My email address is Richard Goldie ma.com. It’s at the bottom of every page. I’d love to hear from anybody about their experience with it and see if there’s any way to make it better or more insightful for people’s research.
Nicole (39m 18s):
Wonderful. And tell us a little bit about your YouTube channel.
2 (39m 23s):
Oh yeah. Thanks for saying that. So in progress right now, there’s, I’ll be doing a new series of videos about the Goldie May Subway Maps. So those will be out at the time of this podcast going live, but there will be, you know, probably a couple dozen, very short videos, like one minute each over each feature. So you can kind of see everything in bite size pieces. And then there are some longer tutorials about various things. And then a new series that I’ve been working on is called Unrehearsed research. This is intended to be long form videos and I’m showing research kind of unedited. So James Tanner’s done 17 or so 18 episodes with me where we take about 45 minutes to go through a research problem and just kind of only lightly edited and really no agenda and just show what it’s like to do research.
2 (40m 14s):
And Nicole has come on that channel as well and done three episodes. And so we went through the Research Like a Pro process and Nicole shared her screen and I just sat back and asked questions and watched as she went. And it was really cool to see the process from start to finish over the course of these three episodes because you can see really how everything’s done, right. I mean, it’s, it’s really nice to see it step by step and see everything that goes into the Research Like a Pro process. So I think if people haven’t seen that they would enjoy seeing those videos of yours on that channel.
Nicole (40m 46s):
Absolutely. And the episodes with James Tanner are wonderful as well. And so we will put a link to that in the show notes So that people can check it out. But I think it’s just a such a fun idea for a, a YouTube channel. One of the comments on one of the episodes we did together on that was how can I slow down the video to see the citations? And I just thought, oh right. That was so true. Like when you’re trying to make a citation, it’s so helpful to see exactly what people are looking at and how they put it together. And, and it’s just so great. One thing I know Goldie May can do is help with citations, right?
2 (41m 20s):
Yeah. So the, there is a place in the Goldie May pro subscription to save a citation in your research Log. And currently it will save the family search and ancestry citations as you browse to them. So if you have the research Log open and you visit a family search or ancestry record, you notice there’s a little citation that they give you. And Goldie May, will copy that over to your research Log automatically as you go. So it’s, it’s not necessarily in Elizabeth shown Mill’s format or any given format it’s whatever ancestry or fem search provide, but at least gives you a starting point for, you know, a citation for that. And then you can edit it to be whatever you want.
Nicole (41m 58s):
That’s such a great way to do it. And often I will do that with the family search citations, because they’re pretty close to the way I would want them. I just have to update a couple things. So yeah. Great feature.
2 (42m 8s):
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And it was fun when we did those videos on the YouTube channel, you know, we, we recorded longer than what we posted because we were browsing through images and we didn’t want, we didn’t think people would enjoy seeing like page by page through the images. So we sped that up and I think it, it’s kind of fun to watch it like a cooking show where you’re seeing says right now we need to wait for this to bake for 30 minutes. And then the, the show just fast forwards, and then right, it’s done ding and it comes out. But we, we try to do that in the videos. And, but yeah, it was interesting to see someone say, Hey, I’d love to see this even slower. Cuz maybe some of those parts that are sped up, someone would enjoy seeing slower. So they see the full, full process.
2 (42m 49s):
But we tried to balance that. So it wasn’t too long,
Nicole (42m 52s):
Too tedious.
2 (42m 53s):
Yeah. Too tedious.
Nicole (42m 54s):
Well, great. Well Thank you so much for coming Richard. It’s been a delight to talk with you.
2 (42m 59s):
Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity and great to talk to you both again and hope you all are doing well.
Nicole (43m 3s):
Thanks for coming and goodbye to our listeners. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye everyone. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them.
Nicole (43m 44s):
We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.
Links
Goldie May Website – https://www.goldiemay.com/
YouTube playlist of videos about the Subway Map – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xX1eP_W_34&list=PLcjePUzU8p0rqqgOwCa_vjjc6rohcCjvO
RLP 90: Goldie May – Research Assistant and Log – https://familylocket.com/rlp-90-goldie-may-research-assistant-and-log/
Goldie May YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/c/GoldieMay
YouTube Video about Subway Maps – Subway Maps: A New Timeline Tool for Genealogy Research – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8vfpldiyjs
Unrehearsed Research Series at the Goldie May YouTube Chanel- https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcjePUzU8p0pv3piR4RrJhmCGhLH7lYrK
Unrehearsed Genealogy Research #12: Nicole Elder Dyer & Research Like a Pro, Part 1 – https://youtu.be/5PMWa_vUwBA
Unrehearsed Genealogy Research #13: Nicole Elder Dyer & Research Like a Pro, Part 2 – https://youtu.be/QyWfzZ7xBNg
Unrehearsed Genealogy Research #14: Nicole Elder Dyer & Research Like a Pro, Part 3 – https://youtu.be/8cMfAanTHEM
Research Like a Pro Resources
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
Thank you
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