Friday's Photo: A Confirmation from Related Faces

My father told me the child in this photo was his father, Redic Eli Bryan, born in 1870 in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. How did he know? Dad's father died when he was eight years old in 1929. His mother died before his father, and no extended family was nearby. Dad was raised by his older sisters. Did they know? 

Studying the photo, I could see that the child was a boy. He was wearing a high-necked, long sleeve shirt or jacket and trousers. He is leaning on a fringed armrest, indicative of other family photos seen in the 1860s and 1870s. If this is Redic, it would be the early 1870s, and he looks about four years old. 

I have found more than a few of this family's photos with incorrect identifications, so I decided to try the free trial at Related Faces to confirm this identification. 

Related Faces uses AI to scan photos and compare faces with their entire database. For this project, I used Related Faces to compare the photo of the young boy with many photos of known family members. 

I had questions about comparing photos to known family members and contacted Related Faces. My questions were answered quickly by Founder and CEO, Tina LaFreniere. She wrote that Related Faces would not give me a definitive answer but would point me in the right direction. Tina also suggested I ask myself the following questions when looking at the suggested pairings:

• Is the date of the photo correct for my person? 
• Is the age of my person correct for the photo?
• Is the gender correct for my photo? 
• Is the clothing correct for the period?
• Is your person making pairings with other people from their family (i.e., are family traits coming through)?

I knew from reading the FAQ page at Related Faces that children often made pairings with many non-family members due to those cute, round faces that don't yet have the hard bone structure of adults. Knowing this, I did not expect to find pairings with high resemblance scores; however, I was pleased with the results. 

My grandfather's best match was that of a very poor-quality photo of his sister Hollon (the pairing at the top). Hollon and Redic share some of the same facial features. However,  the photo could not be of Hollon as I have seen young photos of some of her sisters, who were all dressed in very girlish styles. 

The subsequent two pairings are those of young girls. The young girl in each photo is Redic's oldest daughter, Marie Bryan. I believe that the photo of the child is too old to be that of Marie, who was born in 1901. And I have only seen Marie dressed in girlish fashion in her childhood photos.

The last three pairings show the child paired with men. All three men are photos of my grandfather, Redic Bryan. The first photo was taken in 1900, the second in about 1890, and the third in 1910. 

These pairings convinced me that my father's identification of the child as his father, Redic Eli Bryan, was correct. 

Related Faces

I first heard about Related Faces at a local genealogical society meeting. Tina LaFreniere's presentation came at the time I was reexamining some unidentified photos. I began with a free trial and now have a subscription. Using Related Faces, I put a name to a photo that I thought would never be identified and confirmed the identity of a few others. Watch for more posts revealing my successes with Related Faces. 

If you want to know more about the families I research, click here to like my Facebook page, where you will see each post and other genealogical finds. 

Diana

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