Fun Photo Activity - Family History

Last week, the family history project challenge was to find out how your face fit into your family tree ... and there were a lot of fun entries. This week, the challenge was to go to familysearch.org, in the "activities" section (the same place the "compare a face" challenge was located) but this week, it was "Picture Your Heritage" where you can insert YOUR face into historical photos. 

Here are the girls ... can you recognize who is who?

To give a little hint/help, here's who participated: Janika, Janelle, Jaiden and Jenna from the Jensen family. Derek's girls Aniston, Layla and Noelle. Shane's girls Adria and Rella. Kylie, Corin's wife sent a submission too (Grandma would love for the older, married kids to participate!) As just 10 names are listed, and there are twelve photos, someone submitted more than one. You can see that certain poses were popular!

There wasn't quite as much participation from the guys ... but there were some great shots!

Do you need names at least to guess who is who? Uncle Chris, and his boys Kaden, Corin, Camden and Cayson. Nope ... Kellin didn't submit one, but I sure thought he did! Calder, Keaton, Cooper and Josh also have faces featured.

This activity worked best using a phone or tablet. It needs to access your camera so it can fill in your face (unlike the previous "compare-a-face activity which also allowed you to upload an existing photograph). You can "see" your face fitting into the image, and then adjust the brightness to try to make it match the picture. 

I'll admit ... I didn't know WHERE to put this one!

Just in case you couldn't tell, that's silly Uncle Derek!

In addition to participation awards, there were additional awards for quickest submission, funniest, and most realistic. 

What would your votes be?

Should I re-post the pictures with the names attached, or make you go to the Dropbox folder (these are in the year 2021 folder, labeled with names). 

I tried out the challenge originally, but didn't submit any for the contest ... 

but it was rather fun to play around with. 

If you are signed into Family Search, then it will match your last name up with nationalities that match up with your name. You can choose to go through all the different cultures if you want ... or as Derek displayed, switch sexes too. There were photos for men, women, and even some other group photos, that give you additional picture poses to choose from.

This was a fun photo activity for family history!

How Your Face Fits in Your Family

 

As part of the big Westra Family History project, photos and histories are being gathered, labeled, and hopefully saved in a way that future family will be able to find whatever they are looking for about their ancestors. This blog, the family Dropbox, and of course the church Family History site are all the places the Westra histories are being preserved. Beyond that preservation, family needs to know where these things are, and how to access them. So there have been some family history activities introduced to try and get the grandkids more familiar with everything.

This past Sunday, the challenge was the "Compare a Face" activity found on the FamilySearch.Org site. If you go to the main page, there are a few options across the top. One is "ACTIVITIES" and if you click it, you'll get a drop-down menu of some fun options, one being the compare a face photo exercise. You upload a picture of you, and then it will automatically analyze and match you to one of your ancestors who you look most like. It will give you a percentage, and show multiple people and your percentage of similarity. We have featured this activity once before on the blog (see HERE). 

Now - for this to be fully effective, you DO need to be connected to your family tree. I don't know if all the grandkids already had accounts, but the Blackham Boys didn't, so they had to be set up. Any living family members in your tree need to be added manually (privacy issues)... names and photos. If an ancestor is deceased, they should show up, and you can then link to them and all the pictures/histories that are saved for them.

You can manipulate the activity a bit, and try photos other than the featured faces on family search. Some of the grandkids played around seeing if younger faces were more of a match. Adria matched with a young Shane at 94%. A young Jaiden was a 93% match with Wendy at about the same age. 

Wendy wrote: The kids had a lot of fun with the family history challenge "find-a-face" on FamilySearch yesterday and after they did their matches with various ancestors they started doing matches with their immediate family members. Mom and Chris and I were discussing the other day how many of our ancestors look so much alike from when they were children to when they were adults. (See the screenshot of Joseph and Edward Westra below compared with their thumbnails, for example.) But there are always exceptions and I think I am one of them! I put a recent picture of myself with a picture of myself at ten years old on the find-a-face and it only had a 38% match -- for the same person! It isn't until high school -- post braces and all that -- that I got a 100% match to myself now. Interesting! I was also surprised that I had a higher match to mom than to dad! I thought for sure it would be the other way around. I was also surprised that Jenna and Janika had a 98% match when comparing pictures of similar ages. Interesting stuff!

Here's a look at a couple more from the activity ...

Sisters ...