Photos and Digital Images

Learn how to use artificial intelligence to transform written records and family stories into memorable images. Whether recreating a long-lost family homestead or visualizing your ancestors’ daily lives, discover how today’s AI technology can add a new dimension to your family history research. This webinar will show genealogists how to use the best AI image generators available today and demonstrate the methods for getting the best results from them.

MyHeritage makes it easy to fix problems in old photographs—without having to buy expensive and complicated photo-editing software. Upload a photo to MyHeritage and, with just a few clicks, you can sharpen blurry faces, remove scratches and transform a black-and-white photo to color. If your old color photos have faded, you can restore the original colors. You can even animate a face in a photo and create a video of someone telling his or life story. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to use all these tools.

Excire Photo 2024 is a new program that lets you automatically add keywords and your own custom ones; search for one or more images by free text, keyword(s), groups or individual people; identified faces; GPS locations; event; main colour in an image; by camera model, camera lens, lens focal length used, shutter speed used, and more. All of this metadata is written directly to your files or to XMP sidecar files, so the information stays with your images, not trapped in a proprietary database. This feature rich program is available for Windows and MacOS, even on M1 and later processor chips. Learn how this software can relieve you of much time and effort in organizing your digital images.

Although most American records do not specify immigrants’ exact places of origin, by doing a wholistic study of an entire family, it’s often possible to determine exactly from where they came. Learn about the different kinds of records that can help determine an immigrant’s exact place of birth, such as parish records, ship manifests, naturalization petitions, social security applications, alien registrations and more!

Testaments, dowry letters, land sales, cattle leasing, power of attorney letters, and many other types of documents were created by public and royal scribes all over Mexico in the last five centuries. Notarial archives are rich in detail and history. Whenever they are available, they become an essential tool for genealogical research, adding depth to the lives of ancestors, or bridging gaps when church records have been lost. This conference is a basic outline of these records and where to find them both offline and online.

Genealogy doesn’t have to be expensive—MyHeritage offers a range of free tools to get you started. This session will walk you through how to begin your family history journey without spending a dime. Discover how to build a basic family tree, explore free records, and utilize MyHeritage’s free trials and features to uncover your roots.

Compare and collect the resources that confirm our ancestor’s presence. While adding tax records, non-population schedules, and soil surveys to predict the success while farming or understand the difficulties of adequate production, and how many pigs were really there.

Pedigree triangulation is a game-changer for tackling genealogical brick walls, especially in the challenging pre-1850 era. This presentation offers a comprehensive look at this key methodology, illustrated through a real-life case study of proving the father of a woman’s 1828 birth. Learn to create genetic networks, group DNA matches, and apply key pedigree triangulation steps to break through long-standing brick walls. Discover practical strategies for integrating DNA analysis with documentary evidence, constructing revealing family trees, and creating clear genealogical diagrams.

Have you ever wondered what your ancestors’ lives were like beyond the names, dates, and places? While these fundamental details form the backbone of genealogical research, they often fail to capture the imagination of family members who aren’t as passionate about genealogy. The key to engaging your relatives and bringing your ancestors to life lies in incorporating social and community history into your family narratives. While time travel remains the stuff of science fiction, we can carefully reconstruct the historical context in which our ancestors lived. In this session, Robyn describes approaching social history by using conventional genealogical records in new ways, and using unconventional genealogical records. This session includes multiple examples of how to incorporate our findings into our writing for more creative storytelling. By embracing social history and looking beyond traditional genealogical facts, we can create compelling narratives that bring our ancestors to life. This approach not only enriches our understanding of family history but also captivates the interest of relatives who might otherwise remain indifferent.