Restoring Faces in Your Photos Using GFPGAN- Machine Learning for Genealogy

Original Photo 

Restored Photo

As some of you know already, I am an IT major at Marymount University. Recently I have developed a persistent interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, so you can imagine my excitement when I discovered a tool that incorporates these exciting and constantly developing fields with my other interest- genealogy.

The tool is called GFPGAN and its stated purpose is as a Practical Algorithm for Real-world Face Restoration.

Now before I begin nerding out on all the cool features and advanced ways you can use this tool, I want to drop a couple links that will make using the tool infinitely easier for those of you who -well- just want to use it. These online demos will let you try out the tools without going through a bunch of complicated steps.

Videos Honoring Timothy Wesselowski: His Life and Funeral Service

The Videos

Documentary on My Grandpa's Life

My Grandpa's Funeral Service

My Grandfather's Death

On the 2nd of January, 2021 my Grandpa Tim Wesselowski passed away at the age of 80 years old. He had contracted COVID-19 in the month before and died as a result of the accompanying pneumonia. Unlike many who met the same fate in the last year, he did not die alone. My Uncle Nathan was by his side and my Mom was on speaker phone. My Uncle had spent the prior day with him doing one of his favorite things: watching football with family.

Lets Talk Metadata

Metadata is one of the most valuable tools you can use to organize all the photos and documents you have accumulated through your genealogy work. You can have an easily searchable folder of photos named with random strings of characters so long as you have written quality metadata to go with them. Do I recommend naming all of your files randomly and putting them in the same folder? Absolutely not, but the point is that metadata is incredibly powerful and in this post, I will tell you everything you need to know to get started with using it.

What is Metadata?

Viewing the Metadata of a File

A Progress Update on Census2Ged

I am not quite ready for a release yet, but the next release of my free program, census2ged, will have insane amounts of new functionality added. Since I'm so excited that it's starting to look like a real program, I thought I'd share some of what's to come.

If you'd like to read my previous posts about the program (which I programmed in python and have made available to anyone for free) you can check out the following links:

https://famgenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/09/census2ged-my-new-program.html
My first post about it. It goes over the basics and the functionality included in the first release.

https://famgenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/10/census2ged-20.html
My second post which details the new things I added in the second release.

Anyways, let's get to it! And, if you have any suggestions of things I should add before the actual release just let me know in the comments!

New and Improved GUI

That's right, it no longer has only two input fields!

Okay, so it still looks a little like the neglected lovechild of 90's design and Windows Vista, but we can ignore that for now. 

Census2Ged: My New Program

I was thinking about how I could get past some brick walls in my research using neighbors to my relatives. I ended up transcribing several census pages into Genscriber and then entering everyone on them into my genealogy program as neighbors on a shared census event. However, this was tedious and took way more time than I could reasonably afford it. So I started to think about how I could use my programming knowledge to solve the problem. I wanted to be able to create trees organically using censuses while preserving nuclear family relationships. 3 days ago I started working on Census2Ged. It only works with the 1900 census as of now, but I hope to extend its functionality to other censuses in the future. This post will show you how to use it and what it produces. And, of course, you can download it for free at this link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/census2ged/

Features:

These are the features currently supported in Census2Ged:

• Works with the 1900 US census (and in the next update it will work with all censuses from 1850-1940) 
• Conforms to gedcom 5.5 Standards
• Preserves relationships between heads of the family, wives, and their children
• Records first and last names in correct fields
• Records Race and sex
• Records birth month and birth year
• Records approximate year married
• Records how many children they have living and how many are dead
• Records year of immigration and naturalization information
• Records Occupation
• Records Literacy information
• Records Property information

It does not yet support linking stepchildren, parents of heads, or other non-standard relationships.

A completed individual file looks like this:

Writing a Biography Part One: Research and Citations

When I first started doing genealogy I knew that my goal would ultimately be to write biographies for as many of my ancestors (and their families) as possible. After lots of trial, error, and research I have finally begun this process. My next several posts will be a series that will go in depth on every step I now follow when writing these biographies.

Step one: Organizing Research and Preparing Citations

This is, of course, the most important step. It's important to have documentation that supports your facts; it prevents mistakes and false assumptions from being made and allows anyone reading the biography to reference back to the original sources and verify your information. I personally use Legacy Family Tree software to organize everything. It has a very organized system for citations that makes it fairly simple to add meaningful and useful sources to your work.

Take, for example, this newspaper article: