familysearch hint > Goldie May > HeritageHub

When I started on Familysearch, hints were addictive, causing me to add information to people, and people to the tree. About a month ago I realized I had a lot of hints that I had not processed. 

(To look at them start at your top page, scroll down to record hints and select view all; or from the same page look at the second menu list row across the top and select hints.) (Another reminder that is becoming annoying with the unfinished attachments - especially when what they want you to attach is “UNKNOWN”.)

I started try to knock off a backlog of family hints and remembered why I had not  done some of them: ugly merges, not wanting to step on other people’s toes having attached to their trees, … However I tended to forget what I started looking at, and the truly new ones were getting buried. So I need a research log where I can easily see if I have looked at something before. Goldie May (GM), a chrome extension with familysearch access, seems to fit the bill. I heard about it at Rootstech 2023, but I did not see the need then for I was not using familysearch much. I watched a bunch of videos to get up to speed. I started a GM project for coming up to speed and started logging the video urls in the project and adding tasks to the task list. Unfortunately GM is not accessible from a mobile.

Shortly thereafter I was in the library for another purpose, and I decided to test GM for another aspect it is known for, screen capturing bits behind a paywall. Signed into chrome and the extension became available. Had to sign into the extension with my family search credentials (on familysearch it shows up in apps with privleges.) Eventually I managed to get into ancestry and screen capture something trivial. I am also using this project to test the collaboration feature. Should I be able to see my tree? I have subsequently added my tree urls to the logs. Given how long it took me to get to ancestry, I now have a series of links to library genealogy pages for next time. (And a side email thread with a librarian  has added the state library  on the task list. And there is a state archive too.) Note - when exporting the log, there is no image capability. You can bring each image up separately and twiddle it. Pay attention: on something like a census record, you may want the page before/after too.

I am not able to bring up a library page describing resources without skimming it. I found that I had access to HeritageHub from home. Ran a search on my family name. A couple of days were spent separating the wheat from the chaff. GM counts how many times you access a page, so it is useful when you forget where you are. I added hearts to documents that added new information and thumbs down on people not yet connected (I thought I had all the US folks even if the branches. are not connected) My comment strategy evolved to the new/existing citation number for information in GRAMPS.  BTW GM enables the linking of familysearch PIDs per project. (While I included the PIDs of people I found interesting info on, I did not take the time to record sources or memories for these articles in familysearch.) Unfortunately the free export is pretty minimal with project, time, and url, but not like, dislike, abstract, comment… I have not figured out how to trigger is:restricted for geneanet and such behind a paywall. I suspect that is also pay for. I saw something that said all of this tool’s functionality  is free at familysearch centers.

As I went through this plethora of results I realized my citations were not as good as I hoped (the evening edition?), that I need to come to a better understanding of an exhaustive search (how many obituaries do I need that say something similar?), this url comparison fails to check if it is the same thing from a different web site (some of my SSDI stuff is no longer available. These records have locations but no SSNs).

As I add finding people that are possibly dead into GRAMPS, I realize I resorted to my old habits. I am not tracking my search variations (maiden, married, nicknames, spouse, birth year, state) nor my non-functional results. Did I get no results or too many to wade through? At some point I got sloppy about entering the PIDs as I did not know the tree well enough to get there quickly. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had entered the PIDs consistently in GRAMPS to cross reference?

Was I supposed to drain the swamp? I think this started with familysearch hints. I am not yet using auto log to track the familysearch rabbit holes a document can lead to. They often come by surprise. Stay tuned. Right now I am growing my number of projects and the scope of the existing ones. Still early on the learning curve.