While I was home for Thanksgiving, my fabulous cousin Marilyn showed me some new-to-me old family photographs. They were a mixture of people from both her father’s side (which is how we are cousins) and her mother’s, and there were many people we couldn’t identify. One of the pictures was, to me, particularly arresting and lovely:
I thought that it might be my great-grandmother. Both Mom and my sister looked at it and immediately said “That looks just like Aunt Josie,” who was her daughter. But Mom also thought the clothes looked too grand to be Bertha, who been poor in her girlhood. It could also have been someone from the Lewis side, who we would not have known to recognize.
Fortunately, we live in the science fictional now. (Well, fortunate for my purposes here. In a lot of other ways, not so much.) Using the online facial recognition platform PimEyes, I was able to do an image search of the photo.
The first match is to a blog post I wrote for Brevity about using this newsletter as a research tool, and it is in fact the picture of Bertha that I included with that post, where she is posed with my grandfather Albert and his brother Eddie.
This is, for me, enough to confirm that the first picture is of Bertha, perhaps taken to give to the shadchan (matchmaker) in Baltimore. (We don’t know that my great-grandparents were introduced through a matchmaker, but it wouldn’t have been uncommon in that place and time.) But it’s important to note that if I had no idea who it might be, the facial recognition software would be less use. It also turned up a second result:
While this does, indeed, look a lot like Bertha, but it’s actually a woman named Rosa Pick hosted on the website Centropa. (Which is a whole, wonderful rabbit hole of a website I encourage you to dive right into!) Rosa looks so much like Bertha that they could almost be twins, and she also looks so much like my nephew Emory that it’s a little startling. Perhaps she is a cousin, though that connection is lost to time. So I wouldn’t rely on facial recognition to identify the person in an old photograph if I didn’t have enough other context clues to be able to tell a true result from a false one. And, of course, PimEyes was only able to do this because it’s spider had picked up the photo from the Brevity post, and so if there are no other photos on the web of the person you’re looking for, you may not have useful results. The spider itself is incomplete; it missed another photo of Bertha that was published in this newsletter, taken shortly after the birth of my Uncle Mickey.
What technologies are you using, friends, in your search for family history? I’m always interested in new tools!
Thanks for pointing out this interesting tool. I'm soon to begin the task of going through several boxes and albums of photos that my grandmother had and that my father never got her to identify. I know these new tools can't make information out of thin air, but it will be interesting to try to confirm some ideas.
thank you for alerting me to another tool!