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 ...