Genealogy #70: Genealogy 2.0

There are so many cool tools and toys to play with if you're researching your past. I'm not sure if all of them are helpful but they're certainly entertaining. I created an account with MyHeritage and tried out the celebrity look-alike generator. In my case, my celebrity comparisons are limited to Asian heads of state and Jackie Chan. I almost broke the thing because we all looked alike. Relax...I'm kidding. I think that if you got the whole family in on it, and assuming that most of them were computer literate, the site would be very helpful as a tool everyone could contribute to. The other gizmo was a family Look-alike meter, which uses face recognition technology to decide once and for all which parent you most resemble. Regarding my son, who he looks like is not what's most up for debate, it's which parent is most responsible for questionable behavior. But let's stick with my own lineage. Apparently, I look more like my mother by 12%. My sister looks more like my mother by 4%. I'm not sure where my dad even fits into this picture. I wonder how different the Look-alike meter would gauge an adult photo.

Member discoveries on the Footnote website were interesting, albeit morbid. I like the idea of sharing documents but using the site to create Creative Memory pages for dead folks was....icky. I just saw on the news that the only existing film image of Anne Frank has just been released. It's a mere 20 seconds of the famous Holocaust diarist leaning out of her apartment in Amsterdam to watch a happy wedding couple. The film was shot about a year before she went into hiding. Watching the video made me think of the above photo of my father in Germany during WWII. I never saw the photo until after he was gone so I didn't get a chance to ask him about where it was taken and why he's posing on top of that monument. All of these websites are wonderful tools if you have access to information from the actual participants. If you miss your chance you're left staring at photos and wondering what was left unsaid.