Usually, I have some idea about the faces and places, maybe even approximate dates. Just to be sure, I like to reach out to cousins for help with photo identification.
Photos with a lot of people require a bit of preparation so everybody is on the same page when making identifications. Above, a small section of the 54-person Farkas Family Tree portrait taken on a family Thanksgiving.
Using the "preview" function on my Mac, I added a number for every face. Then I sent the numbered-faces photo to my wonderful maternal cousin B, who quickly sent me back a list of names, according to number. She was delighted to share what she knew, and I'm grateful that descendants will now know the names of everyone in this big holiday portrait.
Thanks to my cousin's assistance, I'm about to send a three-part .pdf file to more Farkas cousins: (1) numbered-face portrait, (2) numbered listing of names, (3) unnumbered portrait.
Maybe this will provoke comments about the identifications or additional family memories?! UPDATE: After one round of identification, a cousin said he suspected one of the children was misidentified. Sure enough, another cousin agreed and I issued a "corrected" version of the file to all. Otherwise, I'm afraid future generations would have accepted the original misidentification.
PS: Sis and I collaborated on our ID of ourselves. She is the smiling, adorable little hula twin in #7 and I'm the just as cute hula twin in #8. Maybe some cousin will be able to distinguish between the two boy twins in the photo, #1 (in the arms of his smiling Farkas grandma) and his twin brother, who was being held by his father (not visible in this section of the photo).
Asking for help identifying people in photos is so important! I wouldn't know who many of the people were in my oldest pictures without input from relatives.
ReplyDeleteYou are so right, Marian! I have a photo from Christmastime somewhere between 1913 and 1917 of Pape first cousins. Five descendants of four of those collaborated to identify the people in the picture.
ReplyDeleteBefore Photoshop I used tracing paper to make an outline of everybody in a large group photo and then numbered the silhouettes. After everyone was identified we named the silhouettes and then used a double window matte to frame both the original photo and the named silhouettes.
ReplyDeleteIn the past, we used tracing paper to create an outline also. But with 54 people in a photo, that was unwieldy for this situation. Plus technology makes it simple to number each person. We're still trying to sort out the boy twins.
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