About 15 minutes · What you'll have at the end: a clear picture of what the Gold tools add — and if you have Gold, your first run of each.
Already a Gold subscriber? This lesson is your activation checklist — these tools are the reason you chose Gold, and today you'll run each one on your own data.
On Silver? Read on to see what Gold adds. Everything you've built in Lessons 1–7 — your database, your clusters, your labels — carries over the moment you upgrade; the Gold tools simply switch on over the same data.
The Warthen Interactive Cluster is the CLM idea, made explorable. Instead of a static grid, you get a zoomable, clickable cluster chart with superclusters — clusters of clusters that typically map to your four grandparent lines — and, best of all, an ancestor overlay: your known ancestors drawn on top of the clusters they explain. The unlabeled areas of the chart are your remaining research questions, visible at a glance. Where CLM answers “what groups exist,” Warthen Interactive Cluster answers “what does my whole match list look like as a family map?”
Remember Lesson 6, opening cluster members' trees one by one hunting repeated surnames? Common Ancestors automates it: it sweeps the trees you gathered and reports the ancestors that appear in multiple matches' trees. A couple who shows up in four of your mystery-cluster members' trees is no longer a hunch — it's a ranked candidate for your brick-wall ancestor, found while you got coffee.
My Trees closes the loop with your own research: upload your GEDCOM file, and the Client compares your tree against your matches' trees to surface the overlaps — which matches connect to which of your ancestors, and where their trees extend past your brick walls.
Gold is $10/month (or $100/year), and upgrading takes about a minute on the Subscribe page — your existing database and everything you've done in this course works with the new tools immediately. A fair rule of thumb: if you found yourself squinting at cluster members' trees in Lesson 6 wishing something would just tell you the common ancestor — that's the job Gold does.
That's the course: install → gather → explore → deepen → cluster → interpret → expand → power tools. From here: