Genealogy Chat

Well, there's myheritage(.)com. From their blurb: 'This is not just another photo sharing site. Our groundbreaking face recognition technology lets you organize your photos automatically and tie your photos to individuals in your family tree. Then the fun starts… You can automatically find more photos of your family members or your ancestors that other users have uploaded. You can finally discover the identity of unknown people in old family photos. You can even find other people around the globe who look exactly like you. MyHeritage is great for historic family photos. All photos are searchable, and even comments made by other users on photos can be searched. If a photo has a dedication on its reverse side you can insert it too.' It would be nice if the software were really as good as they claim, but I can't bring myself to believe it.

I have a number of old photographs of family members whom I can't place; don't even known which side of the family they are on - grandmother's or grandfather's. It might be good if there was a space where people could post photos like this, to see if anyone else recognises them? Perhaps only visible to others whose family trees we're allowed to view? Just a thought.

GR allows us to upload photographs of relatives. If you right click and open a photograph in a new window, you can see a direct link to the image, with this format: http://www.genesreunited.(co).(uk)/picstore/000/149/084.jpg (this is, we think, my great great grandmother Amelia Merrett). What's strange is that anyone can look at this photograph by pasting in the URL, and if you then change the numbers, you can look at lots of other people's photographs. Fortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to extract the subject's name or connect them back to the actual trees in any way.

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