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.

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

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.

Visualizing Shared Events in Your Tree

When I conduct collateral research, I like to add neighbors, friends, and possible relatives directly to my family file, linking them together using shared events. This increases the chance that I will accidentally happen across a family member, while also giving me an idea of their stance within the community. I decided to figure out how to display shared events in a way that I could see all the connections I'd established for a person with a single click. I found a completely free solution and will explain in the rest of this post what that solution was. These network graphs were the result of my efforts.

Network graph of all the people in my file based on their shared events

Filtered view within the network graph of just one person in my file and their connections

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