Match Your Face with Others from the Past or Present

If you want to pretend like you’re working on genealogy, check out MyHeritage.com. You can upload your picture to their site, and it will search a database of over 3,000 celebrity faces to display the ones you resemble most.

Guess who I look the most like?

Britney Spears!

But I also got a match with Julio Iglesias:

Okay, let’s forget about that last one.

Actually, I’m not trying to make fun of MyHeritage.com. They’re using face recognition technology from Cognitec (http://www.cognitec.com) to provide entertainment and genealogy research. You see, you can also search on faces uploaded by others these could be modern or old photos. Imagine finding a new family line because MyHeritage.com found a match with an old photo of an ancestor you never knew existed.

And that’s not all! (I feel an infomercial coming on.) MyHeritge.com also enables you to search over 500 genealogy databases at one time. When it finds a hit with the name you entered, you can click to follow the link.

I’m not finished yet! Very soon, the MyHeritage meta-search tool will enable you to:

- Save searches.

- Annotate searches.

- Find out who else is researching the same names as you.

And later on

- Schedule searches to recur automatically (What a timesaver this one is!)

- Search for places

I do want to point out that MyHeritage.com is still in the beta stage (for you non-geeks, that means they’re still working out a few kinks). But during my most recent visit I had no problems at all.

For those of you who’ve thought that tracing your family tree is boring or too time-consuming, you need to visit this site. MyHeritage.com has made it as simple as entering a name and clicking the Search button. (Hint: The genealogy search is under the Research link at the top of the page.)

~Mary Kaye