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.

How OneNote Can Help You Transcribe Documents

OneNote is my program of choice for transcribing newspapers. It's OCR tools, instant copy paste photo insertion, and flexible formatting functionalities make it a breeze to transcribe documents in no time at all. This post will take you through my transcription workflow, allowing you to just as easily transcribe your source material in a matter of minutes.

What is OCR and Why Should You Use It?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. A character is a single letter within a word. OCR programs will 'look' at an image and identify the characters inside, allowing you to copy and paste text from an image. Using OCR programs will make transcribing go much quicker since the computer does most of the work, allowing you to spend more of your time researching and making discoveries.

1. Insert Your Source Image into One Note

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I will just show an example of one. Much of the time I am not transcribing a full image, but just a portion of one. Thus I usually only want to import a portion of an image into One Note. Windows operating system has a nice little tool called 'snipping tool' which will capture just a section of your screen for you, which is exactly what we need.

For my main image, I will use page 40 from the 1931 Bethany Daisy, my largest currently ongoing transcription project. Here is the image if you wish to follow along:

Page 40 of the Bethany Daisy

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Part 1:The Complete Guide to Deciphering Kurrentschrift (For Non-German Speakers)

Oftentimes the most difficult task for anyone researching their German ancestors is navigating Kurrentschrift.

Kurrentschrift is an old German script which fell out of use after 1941. Although the script is quite beautiful, it can be very difficult to read when first starting out (and for some time after as well). This is the first post in a series which will (hopefully) teach you everything you need to know to start deciphering these texts. It's important to note that these will only give you a jump start. You will be able to (hopefully) read most of your records after working through the steps I outline, however it will take a lot of time at first to read each one. Speed comes with a combination of time and recognition, both of which mean you have to practice. Keep at it though, with each record you transcribe your time spent will decrease exponentially. Personally, transcribing records written in Kurrentschrift (as long as the handwriting isn't smudged or cramped) now takes only a few more minutes than transcribing English records.

Now with that in mind, let's get started!

Using Schrift Generator

Hopefully, the future sections of this series will help you to read your documents in Kurrentschrift relatively well without the use of technology. However, no one can deny the value of having a bit of help here and there. That's where the Schrift Generator comes in handy. The Schrift Generator  allows you to type out anything you want and display how it would look when written in a variety of Fraktur, Sütterlin, and Kurrent fonts. 

The User Interface

The page is in German, but it's relatively easy to use. If you scroll down, you should see an entry field that looks something like this:

The text entry field in Schrift Generator

This is where you type the words you wish to display in German Script.

How to Manually Transfer Your Sources From Ancestry.com to Your Genealogy Program (Quickly)

It's been many months since I first decided that I wanted to manually transfer my sources from Ancestry.com to my genealogy program of choice, Legacy family tree. When I first started my transferring, Family Tree Maker was still actively supporting transfers of information from Ancestry.com to their program and now RootsMagic has introduced support. Yet, I still decided to manually transfer. There were quite a few reasons for my decision to manually reenter the information, but I'll just list the main ones:

1. Ancestry.com has abysmal sources for a lot of their documents in my opinion. In most cases the only halfway decent ones are censuses, and oftentimes I will find the auto-sourcing they do has incorrect values for fields like page numbers.
2. I want everything in my local tree to be as accurate as possible. When I first started working on my tree I was, let's face it, not especially concerned with accuracy. By going through each record individually I can check each record individually.
3. I can save source images to my local file. These aren't for anything other than my own personal reference, as it is not at all legal or encouraged to distribute these images (they are the property of ancestry), but if I ever need to cancel my subscription I can still glean information from them.
4. My tree on ancestry is not mine. I collaborate on it with my great uncle Van Wert (who did extensive work even before records were available online!). So even if I wanted to I wouldn't be able to download everything (which worked out for me in the end). 
5. Name recognition. When you force yourself to really read the records, you will begin to see the same names over and over. Name recognition has been crucial for me in finding immigrant ancestors, as its not abnormal for the names you see over and over to be family from overseas.

A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Fulton New York Postcards Website

On December 25th the Old Fulton New York Postcards website (which, by the way, is not a website for postcards) received a major update that added a whopping 700,000 more old newspaper articles from the USA and Canada. The site, however, has an aesthetic that makes it slightly more difficult to start using than the average site. This post will help you learn to use this incredible resource to its full capacity.

Old Fulton New York Postcards homepage

3 Ways to Use Archive.org for Genealogy

Archive.org is one of the most valuable free resources for genealogy you have at your disposal. This post will teach you how to use it for your own research.

Internet Archive Home Page

5 Beginner Tips for Using the Třeboň Regional Archives

Image source

So you just found that you have Czech ancestors, you even narrowed down the specific location of those ancestors to Southern Bohemia, the region covered by the Třeboň Regional Archives. What now? Note that this guide will only cover the basics of using the archives and navigating the records, it won't deal with techniques for reading the Czech language or for finding people when nothing else is working.

Saving a Full Image from ArkivDigital

Today is the last day of the free weekend for ArkivDigital and I am very happy with the number of genealogical records I have grabbed. However, I wasn't too happy with their options for saving images. If you have used ArkivDigital before you will know that when you save an image it saves only the part visible on your screen. If you zoom way out the resulting picture will be very pixelated and near impossible to read.

Analyzing Sources

As an IB school, my high school is very focused on teaching good writing and researching standards. A lot of these apply very directly to genealogy. For analyzing sources, we use the acronym OPVL.

The letters each refer to a different element of a source to analyze. O stands for ‘origin’, P stands for ‘purpose’, V stands for ‘value’, and L stands for ‘limitations’.

Tip: Finding how many times an ancestor married with census notes

When an ancestor marries multiple times there can often be a lot of confusion if you are unaware of more than one marriage. When tracing the lineage of a female ancestor it can mean the difference between finding her real maiden name and running into a brick wall. Census Notes were small notations census takers made to make counting various statistics later easier. Most of these are pretty useless, but occasionally there are notes that provide valuable information. I have been noticing on several different censuses that sometimes the census taker would note down the number of marriages the person has had. This isn't true for all censuses of course but it's certainly something to look out for.

The way the number of marriages is notated is a number after the "M" (standing for 'married') in the census sections about whether a person is single, married, widowed, or divorced. Here are some examples: