Subtext
Last year when I began my journey into my family history, my cousin sent me a box of old photos and documents that she had been collecting over time. I had been knighted the family historian overnight.
This box was my first treasure trove of information, it was clearly the culmination of years of research. There are letters between my grandmother and her distant cousins in Pennsylvania. The words of distant relatives that had passed a half century ago. Sharing their family research experiences, mentioning major family events in passing.
From a pure research perspective, these letters were not very useful. In what appeared to be years of correspondence, they had unearthed information that now takes a matter of hours online. However, these ephemera themselves have become the subjects of interest. Personalities manifest in these artifacts that had passed through the hands of my ancestors.
The box included a couple dozen photographs. Many of which seemed to have at one time been glued into long gone albums. Many faces without names. Places without context. Were these relatives? Or where they friends? I didn’t know but I started to scan and catalog the information I had anyway.
Fortune
My research has given me a new way to bond with my grandfather. We were always close when I was little but making the transition within your family from the kids table to an adult peer can be a challenge. What do I have in common with someone born in 1925, grew up in the great depression and who was drafted into WWII? He saw me grow from nothing into a mostly functioning adult with my own kid. For him that was less than a third of his life, the majority of his life was spent without even knowing who I was. I thought I knew him, but I only knew him as he is as a grandparent–not as he was growing up in Los Angeles or bring sent off to war.
My new passion for family research matched well with my want to learn more about my grandfather. He is the last connection to many distant relatives. He is the last person who can recognize faces in photos or give my ancestors personality through stories. (Like how his Civil War vet grandfather, would sneak him cookies whenever he would visit him in the old soilder’s home. And how those cookies would always reek of tobacco but he was always happy to get them anyway)
Triangulation
While the pandemic raged on, we religiously maintained our “bubble” in order to protect those most vulnerable in our families. It was important to me that my new son would get to spend as much time as possible with his great-grandfather as he is his namesake. We were able to reward our pandemic diligence with a couple trips to visit family. (The ulterior motive of course was free childcare from our families)
My mom and my grandfather were inspired to work together to try to organize his belongings, including family photos. On one of my visits to his house, I found in these piles of boxes a couple old photo albums with photos in them of people who looked vaguely familiar. I didn’t put too much thought into it, my main goal was to digitize as much as possible as fast as possible so I loaded the albums up and took them back to my parents house, where we were staying, to digitize them.
Organizing digital photos is even more time intensive than just scanning them. I scan everything at 800 to 1200 dpi, I make sure to also scan the backs of the photos to capture any additional information (at 400dpi). I then load everything up into Lightroom and start to try to categorize and tag photos. I start by transcribing every caption there is and store that in the photo’s metadata. Then I try to roughly place the photos in chronological order and try to dig out any additional information I can for each photo. As part of all this, Lightroom automatically searches for faces and if they are known faces, tries to put a name to each face. As I transcribed the captions, I entered the names of the people who were identified and slowly I started to build a database of known people.
Slowly but surely after probably a hundred hours of scanning and updating metadata. I was able to fully identify many of the faces in those original photos in the box–giving names to faces unknown to all those living. Helping to unlock more research threads to pull on and building a more complete understanding of those relatives.
Next time, continuing my journey with facial recognition.