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 for the flagship Gold tool — the Warthen Interactive Cluster — plus a preview of the tree tools coming to Gold next.
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?”
Two more Gold tools are in active development — you'll see them in the People menu marked Coming Soon, and Gold subscribers get them as they're released:
The tree data you've been gathering since Lesson 4 is exactly what these tools will run on — so everything you gather now is ready for them on day one.
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 ran your first cluster in Lesson 5 and immediately wanted to explore it — zoom in, click around, see your ancestors mapped onto it — that's exactly what the Warthen Interactive Cluster does, and the upcoming tree tools are included as they arrive.
That's the course: install → gather → explore → deepen → cluster → interpret → expand → power tools. From here: