Eastman Presentations

Some wonderful ideas and suggestions were offered during the six hour presentations done March 15th by Dick Eastman in Stuart, FL for the Martin County Genealogy Society.

The following are just a few of the interesting hints and suggestions offered:

In the MyHeritage.com – online databases (sign in free creating a user name and password):
They have a software program for photo recognition that is about 90% accurate. Upload a child or baby photo – frontal view if possible. Then upload to MyHeritage an adult photo – head on / frontal view for the software to compare the ratio of distance between the eyes, cheeks, chin, nose and eyebrows. This photo matching will compare to see if the baby photo and the adult photo are one and the same person, just years later. This could be such a help with those baby photos that you are not sure who they are?? It can help also to see if two females are sisters or mother-daughter and the same for males – brothers or father-son. The percentage of recognition is not as high but still good if you are not sure who is in that baby photo.

In MyHeritage.com there are some 1,500 databases – all different collections, plus about 200 million images. There are some 75 million users with about 1.2 billion people (ancestors) listed.

Another idea from Dick Eastman in reference to using the search engine Google is to do your researches, using the ‘Advance Search’ button. This way you can narrow down what you are looking for by name, date range, hometown and even refers to a spouse’s name.

Another wonderful tool with Google are their Google Books. These are online books that you can then search for a certain word or name or phrase (use the Advance Search box). The books totally in digital format are those that are out of copyright protection. If a book is still protected there will still be a listing and a short snippet of the book, along with where that book is available (book store or library) in print. In just a few years Google hopes to have all the books in the world in digital format.

If you have never looked up any possible books with an ancestor’s hometown or their name, that can prove to be wonderful resource, including previously unknown photos in the book, which will still be visible in the digital format.

More of the tidbits from Dick Eastman in future blogs.

Photo:  Dick Eastman (on the left)  in between presentations talking with a couple of the guests in the audience.

 

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