ROOTS & BRANCHES

That time-tested tradition for brides to have somethings old, new, borrowed and blue might be applied to the recent National Genealogical Society conference in Sacramento, California.

Of course, you could well say the old part was simply having an in-person conference after two fraught COVID years of virtual events.

And the new part was well represented by a new Chrome browser extension called Goldie May that offers a helpful and painless way to create a research log along with premium features such as a timeline they call “Subway” and a “Workspace” that automatically saves the Internet browser tabs for those of us who work up a storm with loads of tabs open and then lament when they get lost after a computer crash!

The Subway feature is especially ingenious because it not only is graphically appealing … it will suggest next research steps, too!

Goldie May also has the capability to help automate the citations process as well as compiling bibliographies. Some of the features (project management and the research log) are available for free; the most sophisticated ones such as “Subway” and “Workspace” require a subscription, the price of which is as low as $12 a month or $120 a year.

Developer Richard K. Miller of Provo, Utah, is the developer and named the product after one of his great-grandmothers. You can find more information at www.goldiemay.com.

Also debuting at NGS was the oral-history recording site Rakonoto, which might be classified as the “borrowed” item on the “bride’s” list. Founder Christian Napier surely knows that he’s not the first at the story-telling game, but he has a nice site for people ramping up toward getting family histories in more permanent form.

Rakonto went beta just at the beginning of 2022, and has some great features, including a way to reach out to family members you want to prod into recording stories, which is often the biggest impediment.

Napier is hoping to add editing tools and also an interactive interview feature in the future.

Raknoto’s URL is http://rakonto.io/

There’s probably nothing that makes genealogists more “blue” than having photos without identifications.

Well, Related Faces has an app for that. This outfit uses facial recognition software along with a knowledge database that scores photos on a percentage of likelihood basis that two photos are of the same person.

In addition to being able to compare photos of two Related Faces customers, they are also able to interface with the Library of Congress databases.

Related Faces is priced at $64.99 for six months and is discounted to $99.99 for a year.

The company’s URL is https://relatedfaces.com/

NGS made a credible return to in-person conferences and these vendors helped make that happen!