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What's New

What's been added or changed in the family archive. Check back after each visit to see what's new.

This page tracks what's been added to the archive so you can see what's changed since your last visit. If a chapter, profile, or story has been updated recently, you'll also see a small gold NEW badge next to it on the homepage.

February 28, 2026

Museum-Grade Content Expansion

The archive received its largest single content update, sourced from Dr. Goodman's journals (1987-1991) and public-domain historical records.

Two new stories:

  • The Ostrich Festival: Grandpa Earl Ellsworth rides as Grand Marshal of the first Chandler Ostrich Festival in 1989. Includes the wonderfully specific explanation of why the feather market collapsed: women started riding in open automobiles, and the plumes couldn't take the wind.
  • The Temple Sealing: The year-long journey from Dina's baptism on January 1, 1989, through a turbulent year of family life, to the family's sealing in the Mesa Temple on January 3, 1990. Dad fasted and prayed all night. In the morning, they went shopping for garments.

Historical portraits added:

  • Edmund Lovell Ellsworth: Public domain portrait from Frank Esshom's 1913 Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah, placed in the Ellsworth Family profile.
  • Miles Park Romney (putative, c. 1860s): From the Hannah Hill photo album, placed in The Country Doctor alongside the passage about his granddaughter Isabelle.

Reference-based editorial illustrations:

Four new AI-generated illustrations based on real archival reference photographs:

  • Safford Main Street, c. 1910 (reference: City of Safford Photo Gallery)
  • Mesa Main Street, c. 1930 (reference: Arizona Memory Project, AZ State Library)
  • Chandler Ostrich Festival parade scene
  • Beehive Clothing store trip

Chapter expansions:

  • Chapter 3: Medicine & Service expanded from ~645 to ~1,350 words. Now traces the medical tradition back to Dr. William Erastus Platt in the 1890s, includes Goodman Elementary School dedication details from the journals, Eddie Basha's civic trust, and MomDoc's growth to seventy deliveries per month by 1990.
  • Chapter 5: Legacy & Living Memory expanded from ~558 to ~1,400 words. New "Threads" section traces the Medical, Pioneer, and Transatlantic lines across the family. New "The Living Archive" and "What Is Missing" sections address the project's methodology and its honest limitations: thin maternal voices, untranscribed journals, undiscovered Austrian records.

Magazine-quality typography applied across all eighteen stories, using DropCap, FloatingQuote, Marginalia, and PullQuote components for editorial formatting.

February 25, 2026

Image Accuracy Sweep

Several AI-generated illustrations were regenerated using real-world reference photos to improve historical accuracy:

  • The Rolling Racer in Story #9 now correctly depicts a Wham-O Sit-n-Skate (a flat wheeled sled), replacing a previous version that looked like a Vespa scooter.
  • Camp Snoopy now shows proper Knott's Berry Farm theming.
  • The Wendy's sign in Story #7 now matches the actual 1980s-era design.
  • The science fair board in Story #8 now shows a Drosophila genetics project instead of "Acid Rain."

SEO & Social Sharing

  • Open Graph images now generate dynamically for every route (chapters, stories, profiles, pages).
  • Full OG metadata added: og:type, og:url, Twitter card tags, and canonical URLs.
  • Social links (Facebook, Instagram) added to the footer and About page.
  • Explicit robots meta tag added.

February 24, 2026

Interactive Family Tree

A new Family Tree page, built from the family's GEDCOM data, lets you explore the genealogical connections visually. Click any person to expand their branch. The tree uses progressive disclosure so you can follow the lines that interest you.

Expanded Timeline

The Timeline now tracks 46 events across four branches (Goodman, Ellsworth, Hofstätter, Platt) with interactive filtering. Toggle branches on and off to focus on specific family lines.

New Story: The Country Doctor

Story #16: The Country Doctor tells the story of Dr. William Erastus Platt, who practiced frontier medicine in the Gila Valley for over forty years. Performed appendectomies with butcher knives. Owned the only mortuary in Safford. Organized a mass tonsillectomy of two hundred schoolchildren in two days. His daughter Clara married George Nicholas Goodman and co-founded the pharmacy in Mesa.

FamilySearch Integration

Portraits and documents retrieved from FamilySearch Memories now appear in relevant profiles, including Dr. William Platt's newspaper clipping, the Hofstätter-Rott wedding announcement, and Peter Hofstätter's 1923 portrait.

Analytics

Vercel Analytics, Speed Insights, and GA4 custom event tracking are now live across the site.

Earlier in February 2026

New Chapter: The Widow's Store

The archive now has six chapters instead of five. The new Chapter 2 fills the gap between William Nicholas Goodman's death in 1885 and his grandson George Nicholas opening the pharmacy in Mesa in the 1920s. It tells three stories:

  • Margaret Ann Taylor Goodman was widowed at 43 with nine children and five dollars. She sold the family's only cow, bought some bars of soap, and started selling them from her front room. She ran a general store and post office in St. David for thirty years.
  • George Edward Goodman drove a four-horse freight team at twelve years old and spent his twenties hauling lumber across southern Arizona and into Mexico. He married Roxsana Reed and fathered George Nicholas, who became the five-term mayor of Mesa.
  • Edmund Lovell Ellsworth captained the first handcart company of 250 pioneers from Iowa City to Salt Lake in 1856. He had four wives, forty-two children, and his descendants eventually settled in the East Valley, where the Ellsworth and Goodman families would merge through marriage.

New Profiles

Two new biographical profiles, each drawn from the family GEDCOM records:

Updated Profiles

Nine existing profiles were updated with corrected dates, additional family connections, and new details from the GEDCOM data. Notable additions:

  • Robert Matthias Hofstätter now includes a six-generation lineage table tracing the family back to Johann Georg Hofstätter (born 1739 in Lower Austria).
  • The Ellsworth Family now includes Edmund Lovell Ellsworth's full backstory.
  • Clara Platt Goodman now includes her GEDCOM birth place (St. Johns, Apache County).
  • Clifford Sr.'s death year corrected to 1962 (from 1961) and a note added about George Edward's deathbed scene in 1952.

Dad's Journals

Fifteen stories extracted from Dr. Clifford "Cliff" Goodman Jr.'s personal journals and memoir, covering:

  • Childhood in wartime Washington, D.C. (1940s)
  • Summers at the family drugstore in Mesa (1950s)
  • Cross-country road trips with the family
  • A long night at a mechanic's garage in 1989

You can read them all at Family Stories. Each story links to the people mentioned in it, so clicking on "Dad" or "Mom" takes you directly to their profile.

The Family Index

A new Family Index page collects every person mentioned across the archive. Hover over a name to see a quick card with their dates and description.

Interactive Timeline

The Timeline charts lifetimes across multiple simultaneous generations, so you can see who overlapped with whom.

January 2026

The archive goes live with five chapters telling the family story from William Nicholas Goodman's 1882 wagon journey to Arizona through the Goodman-Hofstätter marriage in 1966. Initial biographical profiles cover eleven family members and the founding of Goodman's Pharmacy, the Ellsworth ostrich farms, and Chandler Community Hospital.