• Artificial intelligence, imaging and genealogy

    Frost Homestead.
    This image began as an old B&W photo of my great-grandfather’s cabin in Erin Springs, Indian Territory. It was colorized using MyHeritage.com’s online process, then restored using Topaz’s Photo AI’s image-editing software.

    One of my favorite family photos is well over a century old. My great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Joshua Frost, and his family are gathered on the porch of his home in Erin Springs, Oklahoma Indian Territory, about 1897. The version you see here, though, has little resemblance to the original due to some interesting photo processing available to those of us fortunate enough to have a trove of old family photos passed down from our ancestors.

    “Dr. T.J. Frost home in Erin Springs, Indian Territory.

    First of all, the original photo was scanned and tightly cropped to show the family on the porch. It was cleaned up and sharpened a bit in my ancient version of Adobe Photoshop. Then, MyHeritage.com came out with its online app that enhanced and colorized old photos. (The genealogy website also features an algorithm that animates portraits, but more on that later.)

    I had been playing around with colorization in Photoshop for years, but it was a slow and methodical process that required many hours per photograph. Now, MyHeritage.com was making the process instantaneous. (I have since learned that newer versions of Photoshop feature a colorization filter, and Ancestry.com now can colorize your family tree photos.)

    I am aware of the longstanding debate over colorization, and I get the concerns over artistic integrity when it comes to cinematography and photography. But I’m less concerned about artistic integrity than making a connection with members of my family whose lives unfolded long before I was born. Colorizing old photos like my great-grandfather’s cabin shifts moments in time closer to my present.

    AI facial restoration

    My next imaging epiphany came with the discovery of Topaz Labs’ suite of image-editing products. At first their software, which uses artificial intelligence to enlarge, denoise and sharpen images, seemed to produce much the same results as Photoshop through a process that is largely automated. But frequent updates improved its performance until a couple of months ago when Topaz released a new version called Topaz Photo AI.

    While the new version does a pretty remarkable job at restoring old photos, the most amazing function of the software is facial restoration. AI is far from perfect, particularly when dealing with low resolution photos with scratches, dust and other artifacts. An AI algorithm can transform a smudge on a person’s nose into a face right out of a horror movie. But other times the results can be amazing.

    Unrestored photo
    Photo restored using AI

    For instance, the only photo I have of my great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Morris, is a wide shot showing her sitting on the porch of her home with two of her sons. Her face in the photo is not much larger than the head of a Q-tip cotton swab. I cropped the photo to a portrait, cleaned it up the best I could in PhotoShop, then ran it through Photo AI.

    A distortion on her chin in the original photo seems to have distorted her mouth in the restored photo, but the results were still pretty amazing. I now have a better idea of what my great-grandmother looked like. Or do I? Does the image depict my great-grandmother, or does it depict images that were used in training the AI software? I really won’t know unless another image of Mary Elizabeth turns up, but for now I am happy to have this image.

    Similarly, I can easily recognize the members of my great-grandfather’s family in the top photo — my grandmother’s twin sisters in matching dresses, my grandmother as the 5-year-old at her father’s knee, etc.

    It can get a little creepy

    MyHeritage.com didn’t stop with enhancement and colorization. The next thing it introduced online was animation of portraits. Its algorithm recognizes and extracts faces from uploaded photos, then uses your choice of 20 algorithm variations to animate the image.

    The animations are interesting, a bit gimmicky and often a little creepy. If the subject is not looking straight forward, the results can be a little distorted. In a photo animation of one of my wife’s ancestors, Nellie Mae Smith, she is wearing eyeglasses and her glasses blink when she blinks her eyes.

    Mazie’s DeepStory

    Admittedly, much of the fascination is the novelty of these animations rather than any historical context. But there is one MyHeritage.com online tool called DeepStory that I believe has value in documenting our families’ stories. It combines AI animation, text-to-speech and a slide-show editor to compose a story about the life of an ancestor.

    Yes, it’s still a little gimmicky and you are unlikely to find a voice like that of a family member whose voice you remember from childhood, but it does capture a slice of family history that might just spark an interest in genealogy for YOUR grandchildren.

    I can envision a day in which artificial intelligence might have immeasurable benefits in rapidly retrieving and organizing a family’s genealogical records, a task that now takes decades of gathering, evaluating and sorting data into physical or digital collections. I also can imagine AI software capable of writing family history books — though as a retired newspaper editor, I’m pretty sure there always will be a need for human intervention.

    But for now, I benefit most from — and get the most satisfaction from — AI enhanced photo restoration. While it doesn’t match the pixel-by-pixel restoration for which I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for a handful of our most cherished photos, it has had a huge impact on our collection of 1,200-plus ancestral photos.

     

     

  • Pandemic Genealogy

    Henry Offord Tuell Sr. in Lindsay, Okla., circa 1915-1918. Henry and his wife Mazie Frost Tuell were married in 1916, and he died in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic.

    My grandfather, Henry Offord Tuell, almost survived the Spanish flu epidemic that swept the globe in 1918.

    It was mid-October in Lindsay, Oklahoma, an agricultural community known for its broomcorn crop. Henry arose from his sick bed, got dressed and headed downtown to the barbershop for a long-overdue bath, shave and a haircut. But he ventured out in the crisp fall air a little too soon, according to my late father, Henry Offord Tuell II.

    Like many who contracted that virus — not unlike the novel coronavirus that now assails us — the damage caused to his lungs led to pneumonia.  In Henry’s case, it was the later that proved to be fatal.

    He died on a Monday morning, Oct. 21, 1918. He was 27 years old.

    “It is with genuine sorrow we chronicle the death of H.O. Tuell, one of Lindsay’s most energetic and worthy young businessmen,” read the obituary in the Lindsay News.

    He was buried the following afternoon in nearby Erin Springs Cemetery in the burial plot of his wife’s family. The Rev. J.E. Couch conducted a graveside service.

    “The floral offerings were profuse and beautiful,” read the Lindsay News.

    This photo of Henry Tuell and Mazie Frost, was taken either when they were courting or shortly after they were married in 1916.

    Mazie, Henry’s wife and my paternal grandmother, also fell ill with the influenza. My great-grandmother, Virginia Frost, nursed Mazie through the flu as family friends cared for my father, who was not quite two years old. Mazie soon recovered from the flu. Recovery from her husband’s death would have taken much longer.

    Henry and Mazie had married just two and a half years earlier, on March 12, 1916. She had worked at the phone company and he managed the men’s department at Perry Brothers Department Store. When they returned from their honeymoon in Oklahoma City, they were met at the train station by a crowd of friends and paraded down Main Street. Based on the hundreds of photos that remain from their short marriage, they were madly in love. Their photos reflect that playfulness of young lovers — they staged pictures standing on a nearly submerged rock in the Washita River, sitting in an old wagon costumed in western outfits, perched in upper branches of trees.

    Henry Offord Tuell and Mazie Frost Tuell were married in 1916. He died of pneumonia two and a half years later after surviving the Spanish flu.

    These photos are a symphony of love, of youthful silliness, of exuberant joy — music that was silenced by a flu pandemic in 1918.

    Three generations of my relatives are buried near Henry in Erin Springs Cemetery and in the town cemetery of nearby Bradley, Oklahoma. Both were frontier communities in Indian Territory where my ancestors settled. Wandering among the headstones, some dating back nearly two centuries, Kathy and I have noticed so many that list date of death as 1918.

    Because of my grandfather’s death, I was aware of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic long before now. But today, with a death toll still rising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the photos he left behind have greater emotional dimension. The story is more vivid.

    And those headstones listing 1918 deaths — husband, wife, mother, child — tell stories of loss and sorrow, of fractured families and communities.

    My grandmother Mazie survived and went on to live a long and happy life. She eventually remarried to a wonderful man, Archibald High, who taught me how to stalk birds and to make rubber-band pistols and crossbows. She prepared countless holiday dinners, hosted the summer visits of grandchildren, and more often than not a trip to the grocery store would take half a day because she would stop to visit with everyone she saw. She died in Lindsay in 1971, a couple miles from the spot where her father had settled the family in the 1890s. She was 78 years old.

    Life went on. It will again.

    Mazie Frost (Tuell) High at her home in Lindsay, Okla., circa late 1950s. Her family settled Oklahoma Indian Territory when she was a girl. She married Henry O. Tuell, who died of pneumonia during the flu epidemic of 1918. She later married Art High.
  • Adventures in DNA genealogy

    I found a long-lost cousin and solved a family mystery. How cool is that?

    First the family mystery.

    One of the skeletons in my family’s closet concerns an aunt, one of my mother’s four sisters. According to the family whispers, she became pregnant while attending what was then Central State Teachers College in Edmond, Okla. She supposedly went to stay with an aunt and uncle until the baby was born, at which time the doctor who delivered the child listed the aunt and uncle on the birth certificate. My mother’s sister then returned home, where her parents (my grandparents) had arranged a marriage with a local farmer.

    Little was said of of this indiscretion, and to my knowledge, neither my aunt nor my grandparents ever disclosed the identity and whereabouts of this child.

    Fast forward a generation. Kathy and I took autosomnal DNA tests from both Ancestry.com and 23andMe in the past year, and we are still fairly clueless about using DNA data in our research. But in my initial explorations on the 23andMe website, I noticed a close genetic relative — first or second cousin — whose surname was nowhere in my family tree. By searching genetic matches I share with this cousin, I was able to determine that our kinship was on my mother’s side of the family. But again, his surname did not exist among the 9,000-plus names in our family tree.

    My newly discovered cousin and I emailed back and forth for a while, exchanging contact information. Then we spoke a couple times on the phone. It turns out he was not raised by his birth parents, but he had been told as a boy the name of his biological father. At last, a familiar name. But it still was too far removed to account for such a close genetic match.

    Until I considered the mystery of my aunt’s unplanned pregnancy.

    My mother and her siblings had an aunt and uncle in Texas who had one child. This child married and had a son by the same name — a name cited by my genetic cousin as his biological father. The mystery baby had been found, and my long-lost cousin was that baby’s son.

    My new cousin and I have excitedly shared our discovery with our family members. I have emailed him photos of his grandmother (my aunt) and we have vowed to get together later this year when we visit friends in South Texas. What an exciting way to launch our journey into genetic genealogy.

    — Tom Tuell

  • Food, family and other joys of a rural life

    Family portrait 02
    Tuell family portrait in 2010

    Not many people think of Oklahoma as a destination. The name conjures John Steinbeck imagery of the Dust Bowl and weary souls taking flight for greener landscapes and better lives.

    In the Seventies, as a restless young man who could not bring his future into focus, I could hardly wait to flee this land. My ancestors had settled here before statehood when south-central Oklahoma was merely the Chickasaw Nation. But it was the American Siberia as far as I was concerned.

    A lot can change in four decades.

    In August 2013, it was time to come home. My wife Kathy, granddaughter Mae and I packed up the contents of our Florida Keys home. We crammed what we could in a behemouth rental truck, strapped the Prius to an auto trailer and headed to the Great Plains. It was one of the best decisions of our lives.

    Two of my three siblings, sisters Carol and Vicki, live in the small town where my parents retired more than 30 years ago. They had helped Mom care for my father, whose health had been slipping in recent years. It was nice to gather around the dinner table with my mother, my sisters and brother Hank, who was making frequent trips from his home in Montana. Mae would become enveloped in an extended family and begin learning what that means.

    About a month after we arrived, my father died at age 96. My mother’s health deteriorated quickly after his death, and she died in January 2015 at age 98. After 74 years of marriage, they essentially had become one being, and she missed him more than she could bear. We are grateful that we got to be with them both in their final days, and we miss them terribly.

    They had dearly loved their home on two and a half wooded acres on the outskirts of Duncan, Okla. Dad loved tinkering for hours in his huge workshop, and Mom spent most every waking hour planting flowers, pruning shrubs and pulling weeds. They maintained the yard like a state park, and hundreds of daffodils, tulips and irises that Mom lovingly planted still burst into bloom each spring. Dad fenced in a large vegetable garden to keep the deer and rabbits out, and for years they supplied family and neighbors with tomatoes and okra. Mom especially loved the birds, so Dad built and maintained bird houses and feeders throughout the property. It was their paradise.

    Now it is our paradise — and responsibility.

    We’ve created this space to document this new chapter in our lives, and our efforts to preserve and improve the legacy left us by Henry and Eunice Tuell.