RootsTech2020 - Day 3

Another day at RootsTech! One thing about RootsTech is that there are so many potential classes that it is hard to figure out which ones to go to. Yesterday my wife decided to spend her morning in the Ancestry booth attending their mini classes and had some great instruction on their DNA tools. Today I had scheduled several FamilySearch classes but after talking to several people in the Expo Hall, I decided to switch it all up and changed my schedule to include classes on accreditation. It has been my plan to become accredited at some time but I always say that I am too busy to make that commitment. I don't ever think I will slow down, so now is as good a time as any to start the process.

The accreditation track of classes was sponsored by ICAPGen and included the following:

• Accreditation: What, Why, and How taught by Diana Elder author of Research Like a Pro and blogger at Family Locket, and Jenny Hansen blogger at My Favorite Ancestor
• A Deep Dive into Locality Research taught by Mindy Taylor from Price Genealogy
• Put It in Writing: Effective Research Reports taught by Jana Greenhalgh blogger at The Genealogy Kids and Lisa Stokes from Lisa Stokes Heritage Research
• Dealing With Documents: Analysis, Extraction, Transcription and Abstraction taught by Mindy Taylor

In addition to those classes I attended a blogger class titled Taking Your Blog from Blah to Beautiful by Amy Johnson Crow, author of the blog Amy Johnson Crow Modern Genealogy Made Easy. This class presented techniques to improve your blog and make it more attractive and user friendly. I'll have to start using the ideas that she talked about in my blog.

During lunch I attended the MyHeritage sponsored lunch. MyHeritage talked about a few of their new developments. 

One of the new developments was their photo colorization tool. The tool was designed in reverse, taking color photos and making them black and white and then digitally aging them. As the computer learned the way to make the photos black and white it was also able to begin doing the process in reverse. During the first week that the tool was available there were over 1 million photos colorized by users. During the first 2 weeks of use it was mentioned in social media more than 60,000 times. You can colorize up to 10 photos for free. If you want to do more than that you will have to subscribe to MyHeritage. 

Another new development was the addition of 1.3 billion records from over 25,000 US City Directories. These records were consolidated to group records which now represent 545 million individual records. This collection was released today! The computer algorithm is able to estimate life events such as marriage and death dates based on the presence or absence of a person in the directory. The algorithm development and collection/processing of the digital images took over 2 years.

The third development that was released is the fan view chart. This chart can show up to 10 generations. Data can be added directly to the people in the fan view and colors are added to distinguish your family lines. They have also made the fan chart shareable on social media. The fan chart can be found by clicking on the Family Tree menu and then selecting the fan view icon.

MyHeritage had a virtual reality presentation at RootsTech that allows you to experience life as the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in celebration of the 400th anniversary. They are also looking for DNA from descendants of Mayflower descendants.

MyHeritage also announced their MyHeritage Education website. This collection is a knowledge base of educational content to master your skills and help you make the most of your research.

As if that wasn't enough, MyHeritage is preparing for the 24-hour Genealogy Webinar Marathon on March 12-13. They already have 6,000 people registered to watch the webinar. You can learn more at the Family Tree Webinar website.

One last announcement from MyHeritage...They have scheduled their next MyHeritage Live Conference in Tel Aviv on October 25-26, 2020. You can learn more about this conference on their webpage. You might want to consider having a combined trip to Tel Aviv for the conference on October 25-26 and then off to London for RootsTech on November 5-6 this fall.

Between the accreditation track and MyHeritage's announcements this has been a great day at RootsTech. One more day left here and then we can begin thinking about coming home. RootsTech 2021 will be held February 3-6, 2021. Time for you to start planning how you can attend this one of a kind event.

RootsTech2020 - Day 2 - Innovation Showcase

It's day 2 of RootsTech! With day 2 we stepped back into the roots of RootsTech by having an Innovation and Technology Session which lasted 2 hours. This session talked about some of the innovations that have come about over the last year and what some companies are working on for the future.

Clark Gilbert, President of BYU Pathway Worlwide gave a talk entitled Trapped by the Crowd: When Wisdom Becomes Folly. In his talk, he gave several examples of businesses that failed to innovate when faced with new technological advancements and how that became the downfall of some of them. Western Union failed to realize the potential of the telephone as they continued to develop the telegraph. DEC failed to consider the market for personal computers as the continued to develop their large commercial mainframe computers. He said there are 5 reasons we follow the crowd and fail to innovate: 1) Peer Pressure, 2) Familiarity Failures, 3) Hardened Habits, 4) Everyday Decisions, and 5) Different Performance Criteria. Following any one of these can cause you to miss an opportunity to innovate and move beyond your competition. We fail to innovate because we see it as being something difficult. In order to accept innovation we need to create a context where it is encouraged. Take risks to gain the rewards. As he was speaking I started to think about the things that I do which are outside the box. I sometimes say "I'm not afraid to fail but I need the opportunities and resources in order to try." I have come up with many innovative practices, both in business and in my personal life. Not all of them have been successful. In fact, most of those ideas have not resulted in a completed project that succeeds. But, the process has taught me many lessons and has helped others find paths to success.

Josh Taylor talked about the innovations in family history, starting with the development of microfilm, moving to CD-ROMs, the internet, and now to digitization of records. Other innovations which have helped move the work forward include crowd sourced indexing, consumer DNA kits, and automated hints and matches. He said "The world before shaky leaves was a very shaky world." But what do we still need? We need tools to make family history more accessible. We need technology that assists us in interpreting and understanding records. We need technology that helps us learn. And we need technology to improve our ability to share.

Ancestry presented a new product that is currently in beta called Story Scout. This product uses a few sources to build the story of your ancestor. It starts with a basic matching record then looks for other details to create a narrative of the person within the context of their time and location.

Treasured Inc., talked about how photographs disintegrate, photo albums sit on shelves, knowledge is lost as the older generation passes, and stories are not passed between generations. To counter that, they have developed a fun and immersive interactive archive in a virtual world where you can populate a museum and other buildings with your families photographs and stories. This program allows you to tell stories, create adventures, and share your archived world with your family.

WieWasWie, an archive in the Netherlands, demonstrated their Links Project. This project is able to reconstruct families in the Netherlands from 1811 to 1945 and build up to 3 generation pedigrees by comparing the dates, events, names and ages included in various records. 87% of the marriage records in the archives were able to be used for this project. The resulting pedigrees are rated by quality and a report of errors is provided so the application can continue to improve over time.

FamilySearch talked about the advancements from the first IGI microfiche back in 1975, to the opening of the Record Search Pilot for digital images in 2007, to today where over 4 billion digital images are now available on FamilySearch. Their ongoing imaging work results in an additional 8 to 10 million pages added each week and now the images are able to be added to the FamilySearch collections within 24 hours of being imaged.

Filae talked about their Geo Search function which uses maps to help narrow down search results. Each of the search results is geo-referenced and placed on a map so the user can select records by location more easily.

FindMyPast stated that they had added 1.5 billion new records in 2019. That is a rate of 4 million new names each day. The 1939 Register had about 10 million redacted names when it was originally put online. But now they have researched and found 4 million of those names can now be published due to the person being deceased. They are working on getting the 1921 UK Census ready for publication in 2022 and have increased the number of searchable newspapers with over 36 million pages now available in the British Newspaper Archives collection. This newspaper collection has records beginning in the 1700s. They are combining OCR and community crowd sourcing to make those pages searchable. They have also opened up their Tree to Tree hints with 99% of their family tree owners opting in to make their trees public.

The final company to discuss their innovations was The Time Machine. I discussed this site yesterday and in my RootsTech London blog but I think this is one of the most incredible innovations that has been presented at RootsTech so far. This project is trying to link together millions of records to tell the stories of the inhabitants of various European communities. It links their social networks, historic maps, and other public domain information to build a contextual representation for each person.

As we look at technological advancements we need to remember that we learn by action and experience, and that creating "the Story of You" brings us so much closer to our ancestors. Genealogy becomes family history which is now evolving into family discovery. So, go out and discover your families of yesterday as well as those you have today.

RootsTech 2020 - Day 1

Day 1 of RootsTech in Salt Lake City begins the 10th anniversary of the event. I can't believe this is my fifth year attending. Each year I have come in a different role. The first year I was an attendee. The second year I was a volunteer. Last year I was a speaker. This year I am working in the expo hall with The Family History Guide.  Each experience has been great, I have learned a lot from the classes, and I have made many friends while at RootsTech.

So, in my previous blog, I mentioned some exciting news. Do you want to know what it is? (drum roll please) - RootsTech is returning to London! The conference will be held November 5-7, 2020 at the ExCel Center. Early bird registration will start at £79 for the full conference and £39 for one day passes. Registration is now open at https://rootstech2020london.smarteventscloud.com/portal/login.ww.

My wife and her niece meeting for the first time at RootsTech

In other big news, this was my wife's first time meeting her niece. RootsTech bringing families together!

Now that the big news is out, let's talk about what happened at RootsTech Salt Lake today. I'll start with the non-class items.

Genealogy Community Builders Forum with FamilySearch was this morning. This project developed when a small group of us from around the country met at last year's RootsTech for some brainstorming. We started having monthly teleconferences which we called The Bridge, where we discussed how we could bridge the gap between the genealogy community and the general public. Over the course of the year we evolved and started a Facebook group called Connecting Family History with Local Community. The Facebook group allowed us to grow the network of individuals interested in sharing experiences connecting with their local communities. Now we have added a FamilySearch Community called Family History Community Connections.

I also had a discussion with MyHeritage where we discussed what I thought were the highlights from MyHeritage that have helped my family history research. This interview was video taped and will be posted later.

My wife and I attended the FamilySearch sponsored lunch where we learned about some of the new projects that we can expect to see this year. Many of the items discussed were the same as last year, including faster access to digitized records, new technology which allowed for faster indexing of records, an increase in the number of field teams digitizing records, and a focus on collecting oral histories. There are now more than 4 billion images on FamilySearch and this number is increasing by the second. As an example of how fast images are being added, there were 41 collections updated or added just today. You can sort the new collections by date to see what has been added. Some collections are being updated within 24 hours of the images being filmed. New technology is increasing the rate at which images are being indexed. About 30 years ago the 1880 census was indexed in 17 years. The 1930 census was added in 2002 in about 15 months. In 2012 the 1940 census was added in 4 months. When the 1950 census comes out in 2022 we might see it indexed in about 1 month. Right now about 2 million top tier records are added each day. The number of oral histories has also been increasing. Currently there is a focus on recording the oral histories of African elders. There are now 47,000 oral histories containing 57 million individuals. One last advancement is the increased use of smart optical character recognition (OCR). This allows the computer to recognize people, places and relationships based on the context of the document. Using this technology they were able to index 25 million obituaries in 8 hours.

In addition to these activities I was able to attend several classes. The first class of the morning was Big Data of the Past - The Fundament for Building a Family Tree of Mankind. The presentation was about the Time Machine Organization. This presentation was given at RootsTech London and I wanted to see how things have advanced since then. This is an incredible project which uses handwriting recognition to evaluate documents, gather data, and correlate events. When it is fully developed it will be able to reconstruct the populations of the past. Images of places can be put together to build digital models of a city. Records will place people within those communities and provide background information about their lives and social interactions. They have a website called Xarxes that displays an example of how this is expected to work.

I also attended D. Joshua Taylor's presentation of My Ancestor was a Farmer: Telling Their Stories. The focus of this talk was on the records that can be used to characterize a farmer's life. One very important record set for farmers is the US Census. These records provide occupations as well as family structure information and some can provide real and personal property values. Beyond the census records there are non-population schedules such as the Agriculture Schedules. These records contain details about the production of the farms. They were collected from 1840 until 1910 but the records from 1890 to 1910 were destroyed. The remaining records (1840-1880) are not all located in one location. Some are at the National Archives, others are on Ancestry, while still others are in state archives. Knowing where these records are located is half the battle. He also discussed other records such as probate, estate, newspaper advertisements and classifieds, associations and organizations, and land and tax records which can be used to build the story of your farming ancestors.

The last class I attended was Put a Face to a Name - Finding Old Family Photos by Lisa Lisson. This presentation discussed how you can find family photos. She stated "No 'cousin' is too far geographically or on the family tree not to have photos of your ancestors (or at least information) on your old family photos." There are many sites where family photos can be found including Archive.org, Flickr, and eBay. Additionally, collections of yearbooks, church histories, published family histories and online family trees can be good sources for photos. And for those of you who have black sheep in your families, don't forget the mugshots.

As you can see, there are many different topics being presented at RootsTech. I hope everyone attending is able to attend the classes they are wanting to hear. For those of you at home, the live stream schedule can be found here.

RootsTech 2020 - The Day Before

It is time for a new episode of RootsTech, their 10th anniversary. Most of the attendees are beginning to arrive and headed out to do some sight seeing, visit the Family History Library to do some research, or just get together for some socializing. We got in last night and met up with Elizabeth Swaney O'Neal, a fellow blogger and Ambassador for RootsTech. We shared an Uber ride to the hotel and had time to discuss our families and what we are working on. Networking is a major part of the RootsTech experience.

My wife came along with me this time and she is trying to acclimate to the dry and cold conditions. It is a big change from Florida and I think her gills are drying out. You definitely have to drink your water while you are here. And then I injured my elbow and now have limited mobility in the left arm, that will make it hard to keep up on my blogging. Luckily I only use two fingers when typing and my right hand handles about 2/3 of the keyboard so it isn't too much of a handicap.

The exciting part of this week for my wife is meeting a couple relatives for the first time and attending a wedding reception for one of her old Primary kids. She is also looking forward to getting some time to do some research in the Family History Library where she will try to prove her DNA results by focusing on three sons of a common ancestor to see which line is hers. I'm looking forward to the conference, meeting some friends, and networking more with the other genealogists. I will be pretty busy attending classes, working at The Family History Guide booth, meeting with FamilySearch and MyHeritage staff, and just socializing.

So, what do we do the day before RootsTech officially starts? Since this is her first time in Salt Lake City, we spent our time with sightseeing and some networking. My wife and I explored the area around the Salt Palace. Our first stop was the Church History Museum. They had done a renovation a couple years ago and the displays and stories were well designed and engaging. We talked to several of the people working there and learned more about the events in the churches history. Afterwards, we went to the Family History Library to do a little research. We selected a work station and began looking for my wife's brick wall, James Albert Walker and then I heard someone from an adjacent work station call my name, it was one of my genealogy friends from The Second Life Virtual Genealogy Society. We had a short conversation and then it was time to head out for the next activity.

Geneablogger lunch with Fran Kitto and Cathie Sherwod

Then it was off to lunch at the Blue Lemon with the Geneabloggers. The Geneabloggers are a group of genealogy bloggers who socialize on Facebook. We share our stories and interests and hopefully inspire others to take on the challenges and joys of family history research. My wife and I sat with two bloggers from Australia, Cathie Sherwood and Fran Kitto. We had a great time discussing Australia and their research as well as my wife's Australian relatives.

The organ in the Tabernacle.

Temple Square is partially closed due to construction but we were able to visit the Assembly Hall, Tabernacle, and North Visitor Center. At each location, the missionaries gave us tours and explained the history and meaning of the various locations. Then we went to the Conference Center and got a nice tour of the location from two sister missionaries from Canada. We even went onto the roof of the Conference Center to see all the dormant plants up there. Each side of the roof is planted with vegetation from the respective side of Utah.

Registration for RootsTech opened at 4:00, so we went to the Salt Palace to take care of our registration. Registration and checking in is so much easier and quicker now with all the prep that the RootsTech staff have done. We were done in seconds. Then it was off to explore the classroom locations and see who was around. The Speakers and Ambassadors had their meet and greets during the afternoon also so I was able to see many of my old friends and see what they have been up to.

By this time my wife was totally exhausted so we headed back to our hotel for a quick bite and some rest. It was a bit crowded on the sidewalks with crowds of people headed to the Vivant Arena to see the Miranda Lambert concert. As we were walking we started talking to some of them, mainly about the weather and our "winter coats" from Florida, which were basically light jackets.

There is so much to do and so little time to do it while we are here at RootsTech. Oh, and wait for the big announcement in my blog post this evening. What will be happening with RootsTech in the future? You will have to wait to find out. Until then, have a great day.

What’s New In FamilySearch 2019-2020

Did you know that FamilySearch International, formerly known as the Genealogical Society of Utah, celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2019 and that the FamilySearch website is now 20 years old? It seems like just yesterday (1999) when FamilySearch.org first opened its website to fanfare and a rush of users and then promptly crashed due to the unexpected stampede of enthusiastic genealogists. During all those years, FamilySearch has been an innovator and leader in the genealogy world, transforming the way we do family history research while providing access to billions of records.

So, what happened in 2019? First of all, the number of registered users for the FamilySearch website grew by over 2 million from 11.8 million in 2018, to 13.9 million in 2019. Those users contributed 72 million new individuals and 262.5 million sources to the Family Tree. In addition to that, the users contributed more than 8.75 million photos, stories, documents, and recordings from their own collections to the Memories in Family Tree. FamilySearch also did its part by adding more than 123 million name-searchable records and another 832.5 million new record images to their collection. All of these sources and records help to build and prove the relationships between people and contribute to “The Story of You”, the theme for RootsTech 2020, through encouraging people to discover who they are by bridging the gap between the past and future.  

Beyond just adding records, FamilySearch also provided some upgrades and improvements to their website. One of these additions was the long awaited ability to edit indexed names for some records. This allowed the users to correct indexing errors as well as errors in original documents by editing the names. Future improvements in editing, expected in 2020, will allow for dates and places to be editable.

There were also some additions to the ways families are presented in the Family Tree. Now, same sex marriages can be added as well as indicating “no marriage” and “no children” events between couples. These will help reduce the number of notifications and research tips users receive.

We are all grateful for the work done by others, whether that be indexers or fellow researchers, to help build our family trees. Now, we are able to express our thanks. When viewing the indexed information for a record you will see a box in the lower left indicating that the record was indexed by a volunteer. You can then click on “Thank the volunteer” and send them a short message. Also, occasionally, you may see a popup which informs you of the top contributors in your family line and provides a way to thank them for their work.

Another new feature is the ability to see how you are related to a contributor. Many times we get messages from other users asking how we are related to the family. Now they can just click on the contributors name and see that connection, if the contributor has their relationship indicator turned on. This can be found in your user profile, just click the box to turn it on.

Also, new advancements in computer learning are pushing the boundaries of technology. BYU Linking Labs is working on several huge projects. One is the Community Reconstitution Project. This project works to reconstitute communities (groups of people, populations of towns or counties, etc.) by pulling names from record sets. Another is the Census Tree Project. They presented this project at RootsTech 2019. The project links the 188 million people that lived in the US between 1900 and 1940 across the census records. In my opinion, the most amazing project they are working on currently is the Automated Indexing Project. This project provides the technology necessary to automatically index records, including handwritten records. They recently completed indexing the 122 million people in the 1930 US Census and are also working on the 1940 US Census and Ohio death records. Volunteers can help teach the AI computers by using the app located at bit.ly/rll-index. 

These are just a few of the many updates in FamilySearch during 2019 but what can we expect in 2020? Well, we should see improvements in the merging features. Some of us have already seen this improvements as it was tested with random users last fall. There will be new ways for us to manage and share our Memories. We will be able to better track our contributions to the Family Tree, and there will be an increase in our ability to find new records. The Explore Images tool will open up new digitized records within days of the records being collected. 2020 will be another groundbreaking year in family history research at FamilySearch.

To read more details about these improvements visit the following pages:

FamilySearch 2019 Genealogy Highlights

FamilySearch Updates Enhance Your Experience

See How You Are elated to Other Users - FamilySearch Update

What to Expect from FamilySearch in 2020

What's Coming to FamilySearch in 2020

BYU Linking Labs Projects

BYU RLL Hints App

BYU Record Linking Labs Facebook Page

Researching My Hometown Ancestors

It is nearly Christmas and winter still hasn't arrived for us. We had two weeks where the temperatures got down into the 50s and 60s but this week it has been in the mid to upper 70s again with frequent rain showers. It is hard for us here in Florida to realize that many parts of the rest of the country are having winter storm advisories. With weather like that we really don't get forced into staying indoors for days to do our family history research but when I do get a good chance to research, I want to make sure I am getting the most out of my time. So, here are some suggestions on making sure you are focusing on sources with the potential for high returns.

Map of Ohio where my research is focused.

I am one of those lucky people who don't have far flung ancestors to research. My research focuses on a very small area of Ohio consisting of parts of four counties; Auglaize, Darke, Mercer and Shelby. And within those four counties it is mainly within the four corners area as shown in the red square on the map.

First of all, I want to discuss the general process of finding the sources for your locations. This step, developing a locality guide, can help you learn more about the area you are researching and help you find the important resources that you need to be successful. The FamilyLocket blog and podcast have some great tips on creating locality guides. They have three podcasts on this specific topic: RLP 4, RLP 5, and RLP 18.

Where are some good places to begin developing your locality guide? First, I would suggest using the FamilySearch Wiki. If you aren't familiar with the FamilySearch Wiki, it is "a free, online genealogical guide created and maintained by FamilySearch. It contains links to genealogy databases, websites, other resources, research strategies, and genealogical guidance to assist in the search for your ancestors. Articles included are locality pages for countries around the world and topic pages that include pertinent genealogy record types explaining how to use the record, what it contains, and how to find it." The Wiki is developed and edited by teams of users, much like Wikipedia, who are familiar with the research topic and want to help provide the resources necessary for you to have successful discoveries. The Wiki can be searched by genealogy topic as well as locality. Since the topics are developed by volunteers, some sections may be more complete than others. For example, in my research of Auglaize, Darke, Mercer and Shelby counties in Ohio, I would look up each county in the Wiki to see what information is readily available: Auglaize, Darke, Mercer, Shelby.

Another website that I would use to help develop my locality guide is The Family History Guide. The Family History Guide is generally seen as a tutorial for learning how to use the big four genealogy sites (FamilySearch, Ancestry, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage) but it is also a great resource for finding locality information to help research your ancestors. To find the location information, click on Countries in the menu bar at the top of the Family History Guide web page and select the country you want to research. In my case I selected United States. Once on the US page, I selected Ohio from the list of states under the title bar and before the general lessons on US Records and Searches. On the Ohio page there are a series of general lessons to help you understand researching the state and there is a list of county resources at the bottom of the page. This list has the name of each county and a series of letters (for example, Auglaize A L G U). Clicking on the county name will take you to the FamilySearch Wiki page for that county. Clicking the A links you to the Ancestry card catalog for that location, L goes to the Linkpendium list for that location, G goes to Genealogy Inc's list for the location, and U goes to the USGenWeb page for the location. Each of these sites may provide you additional resources to add to your locality guide.

Google is another source for your research. Make sure you do a thorough search on Google and its various sites. Searching Google can help you find the local historical societies, libraries and museums which may have resources of information that can assist you. The search can also link you with others researching the same families and locations. Searching Google Books can provide county histories and other resources that can help build the historical context for your research. For example, I was able to find a book titled "History of Western Ohio and Auglaize County with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Pioneers and Prominent Public Men" published in 1905. These county histories can provide excellent hints for your research.

Newspapers are also an important resource when researching a particular location. I was lucky enough to have several of my local newspapers already online for free. One of my favorite free sites to look up newspapers is Ancestor Hunt. They have a general page about using newspapers for your research and a more specific page for finding resources by state. For Ohio, they have links to several hundred newspapers around the state in various collections. Two of my most used newspaper resources are the Community History Archive of the Coldwater Public Library and the Minster Historical Society's Newspaper Collection. These collections have more than 100 years worth of local newspapers for the Auglaize County area available online. You might also have luck finding local newspapers on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America site. Other locations to look for newspapers are University collections. For example, Bowling Green State University has their collection of newspapers here.

I also suggest that you look at maps for your area as you are researching. Historic maps will show boundary changes and potentially towns that no longer exist. Plat maps will show land ownership changes over time. Current maps will help provide current landmarks for you to use during your research. One of my favorite mapping sites is Historic Map Works. They provide a variety of old maps including plat maps and gazetteers.  Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps can provide details about buildings in an area. These maps show the footprint, construction materials, and floor plans of various building. Examples of these maps can be found in the Library of Congress map collections.

I hope these links will help you develop your locality guide and set you on the way to successful researching. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all!

Color the World - Comparing Various Colorizing Web Sites

My puppy, Tyrion, stealing my chair

It has been a bit over a month since my last blog post. Back in October I was in London speaking at RootsTech and doing some sight seeing with my wife. We had a great time visiting her ancestral homeland and even got to see where one of her ancestors was buried at the Tower of London and another in Westminster Abbey. Since then I have been pretty busy. Our new puppy is very demanding and every time I sit down at the computer he begins to cry, so I haven't had much opportunity to write lately. My wife named him Tyrion after her favorite character in Game of Thrones.

But, I finally have a chance to write a short blog post so I decided to provide some input on the current interest on colorizing old photographs. I wanted to compare three of the leading colorization websites - Algorithmia, Colourise, and DeepAI. I had written a blog post about Algorithmia back on July 26, 2016, but decided to do this updated comparison now that there are competing sites out there.

All three of these sites are one step colorizing pages. All you have to do is upload the photo and hit the button to colorize the photo. I will show you the images from each site so you can compare them yourselves.








The first set of images is a photograph of a little girl's First Communion. The original was a sepia toned photo and I have no idea as to the color of the actual items.
















This photo was colorized at Algorithmia. The photo seems to be a bit overly pink in the skin tones in the face but almost grey for the hands. The piece of furniture that she is leaning on has a deep wood tone while the floor is an odd brown color with blue tinges. The background appears to be a vibrant blue sky with clouds and trees. The vine drapped over her has a blueish tint.

This photo was colorized at Colourise. The photo seems to be overly green and the skin tones are a bit muted. The piece of furniture in this photo seems to be made of metal with heavy steel colors or could be a darkly stained wood. The floor is grey and could easily be interpreted as concrete. The background here looks almost abstract with little discernible image compared to the other two images. The vine draped over her has a green tint and looks like leaves.













This photo was colorized at DeepAI. The piece of furniture appears to be wood at the top and then transitions into a darker color toward the bottom. The background in this photo has good colors but the blues are a bit muted compared to the one from Algorithma. The skin color is good but appears to fade off along the edges. The vine draped over her appears to have some red flowers with the green leaves.

This is the original photo of the Stueve family from Ohio. Hopefully we will see various colors in each set of clothes and have nice green grass when it is colorized.








This photo was colorized at Algorithmia. The grass looks fine but the other parts of the photo are not correct. Most of the skin tones are grey. The clothes tend to remain black or grey with red tones randomly placed.







This photo was colorized at Colourise. It is much more vibrant than the one done at Algorithmia. The skin tones look more natural but there are some random red spots around the chins of the men on either end.

This photo was colorized at DeepAI. The colors here are similar to those provided at Colourise but the random red spots are gone. 

This is the original photo of Jim Botkins. It is a nice sepia head shot.

This photo was colorized at Algorithmia. It has a blue tone to the image background which is also present in the image from DeepAI but not from Colourise.

This photo was colorized at Colourise. This photo seems to have a lot of darker tones around the face and the hair isn't as blonde as I would expect.

This photo was colorized at DeepAI. This image has a more consistent blue tone to the background and the hair and eye color look more natural compared to the other photos.










As you can see, the results of colorization depends greatly on which application you use. Also, Algorithmia adds a mark on each photo with their website. The other sites do not add a visible mark on your photos. Overall, I liked the results from DeepAI the most, followed by Colourise, and then Algorithmia last.