Ancestry Saturday: More Use of Facial Recognition Software For Genealogy Matching

Recall I tried to match one of six trombone players in the Regimental Band of the Tenth Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry of the Spanish-American War to my grandmother and great aunt.  I really do want to scientifically attempt to verify which person is my great grandfather rather than go by a poll or my gut.

I tried some more use of the MyHeritage.com Look-alike-Meter app to see if I could make a better, more scientific case for deciding to conclude that one trombonist was my great grandfather as opposed to one of the other five.

The app is designed to be more gimmick, than tool.  One enters photos of a mother, a father, and a child to let the software tell you whether the child more resembles the mother or the father.

I still found a way to manipulate use of the tool to reach a conclusion.  As a result, I'm more convinced than ever that this is, indeed, my great grandfather.

Here's how I did it:

I took four random photos from the Internet of women who could be considered resembling the trombonist.  I plugged in those strangers with this trombonist and then used the Look-alike-Meter to see whether the app thought those random women more resembled my grandmother and aunt than the trombonist.

After all, if the trombonist was a completely random person then there should be a no better than 50/50 chance he resembled my relatives more than the random women. 

Turns out, there was not one out of eight cases that the Meter said the random women more resembled the trombonist.  That's a breakthrough!

In my great aunt's case, the resemblance favoring the trombonist in four cases was never less than 45% resemblance factor.  For comparison, consider that my grandmother, known to be a relative, tested in resemblance to my great aunt at only 12%.  Thus, that's a pretty significant find.

In my grandmother's case, the resemblance was a much lower percentage with even one person near flip-of-a-coin resemblance (maybe that model is related?).  However, the other three out of four favored the trombonist in resembling my grandmother versus a random woman.

I think we found him.

Just sharing.