Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Giving MyHeritage photo tools a spin

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There are so many amazing options for online research. Some, like FamilySearch and Chronicling America, are free. Others are fee-based. I’ve subscribed to Ancestry for a dozen years or more and always feel like it’s a worthwhile investment. More recently, I’ve started subscribing to Newspapers.com and just reupped. (I love newspaper research.)

But it was not until recently that I subscribed to MyHeritage. I was actually given a subscription to MyHeritage by the company gratis. They approached me about doing a Facebook Live presentation and about partnering with them for a week-long special promotion to my readers. (That promotion will be going out on Friday–if you’re not already on my mailing list, I encourage you to subscribe so you’ll get the offer in your inbox). When they asked me to partner with them, I requested free access so I could try it out before recommending it to my readers.

So I’ve been using MyHeritage a bit–not a ton because I haven’t had a lot of time for researching in the past couple of months. But I love that they have rich databases (16.9 billion records!) and also some pretty spectacular photo tools.

To test those out, I uploaded a couple of photos from my hard drive.

First, here’s a sepia-toned photo of my second great grandmother, Jennie Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933) taken in 1917. I uploaded it to MyHeritage and used the Colorize, Repair and Enhance tools to improve the photo. The results are pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

I now feel like I can look into Jennie’s eyes and imagine a conversation with her, something that never felt possible with the old photo.

Here’s another example. This is the William Reese Rasco family in 1907. This photo graced the mantle at my aunt’s house for many years. My aunt recently moved and gave this photo to me. I consider it one of my treasured possessions. The baby in the photo is my maternal grandmother, Beatrix Rasco Adams (1907-1987).

This one feels a little different to me. It might be because I’m so familiar with the photo and the fact that the original photo is black and white (rather than sepia), but the improvement doesn’t feel quite as dramatic. It is fun to see what color my great great grandmother’s scarf might have been, though!

I downloaded the improved photos to on my hard drive and am storing them with the originals with the word Enhanced added to the end of the file name. I can’t wait to upload more photos. Since these two photos are portraits, improving them didn’t add a whole lot of information. But I know from watching Photo Detective Maureen Taylor’s Facebook Live for MyHeritage that these enhancements can bring out clues in photos that aren’t easily seen in the originals.

Another photo feature that MyHeritage has introduced is animation. You upload a still photo and they will animate the individual or individuals in the photo. Here’s an example, using the photo of my great grandmother Jennie.

 

And here’s my great aunt Lessie Rasco, from the portrait above.

I’m a bit on the fence about the utility of this one. But it is pretty fun and I imagine it might make sharing the photos a little more interesting for non-genealogy-focused relatives

Have you used these photo tools? What do you think?

Again, if you’re on my mailing list, you’ll receive an email from me on Friday with a special link for a really great discount on a MyHeritage subscription (for new MyHeritage subscribers only.) Full disclosure: they will share the revenue from your subscription with me. If you aren’t on the list, you can sign up here or in the form that pops up when you scroll to the bottom of this page. When you sign up for the mailing list, you’ll also get a short series of daily emails from me, along with a end-of-the-month email with links to the previous month’s blog posts. You can unsubscribe at any time.

 

 

Help FamilySearch index the 1950 census

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The 1950 census was released 12 days ago and, as we’ve talked about before, a computer-generated index was available (amazing!). That index was better than nothing, but at least in the case of my people, not particularly helpful.

FamilySearch is looking for volunteers to check the computer index and make corrections so that a robust index will be available. And they’ve made it very easy.

Just go to FamilySearch.org, login and click on “Start Now in the Help Review the 1950 Census Index” banner. You’ll get to select a state (currently, the state list is limited), then you’ll click Get Started. I selected Oregon and was offered the opportunity to Review Families. In the next screen, I could enter a surname if I wanted. If you do that, you’ll be presented with pages with that surname, as well as other entries. Then you review and correct each line of the page.

I find this a fun and rewarding volunteer opportunity and I’m so happy that FamilySearch has made it so easy. The volunteer effort will make an accurate index available all the sooner!

 

1950 Census clue: Sheet 71 and up

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I spent the day with the 1950 U.S. Census on April 1, as anticipated, and I was bleary eyed (and brain dead) by afternoon. But I had a great time. When I found my teenage mother (who passed away in 2015) on the census living with her parents and little brother, I got goose bumps.

I had done a pretty good job of finding enumeration districts (EDs) in advance, which was good, since the search function worked for just one of my people. I had the joy of finding my grandparents when I wasn’t looking for them. (I was looking for my aunt, who was married and in her own home by then and just stumbled upon my grandparents.)

On April 1, I found father (in his fraternity house at Whitman College), my mother living with her parents and grandmother, my paternal grandparents, and two sets of great grandparents. I didn’t find my aunt (my father’s sister, who is still living) though I browsed the EDs I thought she might be living in page by painstaking page. And I also searched in vain for my father’s paternal grandmother. (I’m determined to keep looking!) I’ve processed the documents I found, but I haven’t had a chance to do much more looking. I’m excited to get back to it.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of “No One At Home” entries on the pages you were looking at. I wanted to share a tip I learned only after I had done all that browsing. For every enumeration district, no matter how many sheets it has, the names of those folks who were re-canvassed after not being at home starts on Sheet 71. An ED might have 30 pages to browse, but it might skip from sheet 26 to sheet 71. So if you find your person’s address and it says No One At Home, I suggest you skip to sheet 71 (and beyond) to if they’re there. (And take comfort in knowing that sheets 26 to 70 in this example aren’t missing.)

I’m going to go back to some of the EDs I browsed looking for my aunt and great grandmother and make sure I pay especially close attention to Sheet 71 and up. I was pretty bleary eyed by the last pages of any ED and I’m hopeful perhaps I just missed them.

If you’d like to read more detail about how enumerators were instructed to handle No One At Home, check out this detailed blog post from the History Hub, the National Archives’ crowdsourced platform: 1950 Census: Enumerated Out-of-Order – “Callbacks” and Others on Page 71 and Up.

Happy hunting!

The bright side of the backlog

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I often post here about having a backlog of documents that I need to deal with. When I get on a roll, I tend to download documents willy nilly, rather than pausing to process each one before downloading another. I do always rename the file as soon as I download it and put it in my Surnames folder. That list of unprocessed documents used to stress me out or at the very least make me feel like a bad genealogist.

Before I focused on my backlog during the January 30 x 30 challenge, I had 88 documents to process! (By process, I mean extracting facts from the document, entering them into my database on Reunion and creating a source citation that is used for each fact.)

By the end of the January 30 x 30 challenge (well, actually by the first week in February), my backlog was gone. And since then I’ve been focusing on watching RootsTech classes and prepping for the 1950 census release, so I haven’t been adding to the backlog since then.

It felt great to clear out the backlog. But I realized something that surprised me: I kind of miss my backlog. What? Here’s the bright side to having a letting documents pile up. When I have a backlog, I always have a mini-genealogy project at the ready. I just pick a document and process it. (I actually enjoying processing documents, so it’s not a hardship.) I don’t have to figure out what/who I want to research in a given session.

Now that I have no backlog, I have to get focused on some research questions. Weirdly, I feel a little like I’m starting from scratch.

So here’s what I decided today: I’m going to allow myself to build a backlog of up to ten documents without feeling guilty about it. But when I hit ten, I will stop looking for more and start processing what I have. I’m calling it the Rule of Ten. I imagine there will be times when I have more than ten in a given session. But I will whittle it down to below ten in the next one.

This feels really good to me and I can’t wait to see if it works out well!

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.