So one way or another, you’ve probably heard about the MyHeritage photo tools. This started a whole episode of excitement to try these tools out. To this day, they are some of the most exciting things you can try out on old photos. I’m always (along with many others) are looking for new and exciting ways to get the next generation interested in genealogy. This can start up a whole whirl of emotions be it happiness or sadness. There’s one in particular that blended those two feelings together which I’ll talk about later.
But where did all of this magic start? The date, February 11th 2020, I got an email from Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage telling me about a new feature they’ve added working with Jason Antic and Dana Kelley of DeOldify and talked about being able to colourise black and white photograph. Being an absolute lover of old photos I immediately went on to their website to give it a go and this is one that I tried out. Colourisation, it’ll never give you the full picture as it mightn’t be the same colour as it originally was.
The photo above is of my grandmother Kathleen, who has been compared to Princess Margaret! (Although I can assure you that there isn’t any royal connection…)
But it didn’t stop there… along came the photo enhancer. The way of making your fuzzy photos become crystal clear all of a sudden! My example of this is:
Now, this one must’ve fallen through the cracks for me because I completely forgot this was a thing but while finding photos to put in this I had one sitting in my gallery on MyHeritage. I don’t know if it had been in a frame sitting in sunlight for long periods of time but this restores the colours as best as possible and I was surprised with this one!
And finally, this was the utter emotion-starter for me (and my personal favourite) – Deep Nostalgia, if you’re into genealogy conferences the date might stand out to you… if it doesn’t this was announced during RootsTech Connect 2021. This made your ancestors come to life for a matter of 17 seconds but it’s 17 seconds more than you’d probably get otherwise.
Now you may have wondered why I called this post “The Unofficial TARDIS”. The reason why is because it’s the closest thing we’ll have opening up that door to the past, have you had a go at any of these? If so, tweet us @TheHiddenBranch, we’d love to hear!