For as long as I can remember, my Aunt Rose—one of my dad’s sisters—was the keeper of our family photos. And when I say “keeper,” I mean she had almost all of them. After Aunt Rose passed away, and later her daughter as well, our family lost track of anything she might have saved.

A few years later, her son mailed everything to my mother. I’ll always be grateful that he thought to send them our way—because he was right. Inside that package were photos from my paternal grandparents, including precious childhood pictures of my dad and his siblings. I digitized them and safely stored them in my FOREVER account in 2018.

In 2022, another treasure surfaced. My cousin—the son of Aunt Mary, another of my dad’s sisters—lent me his photo collection. I digitized the ones I wanted to keep, and it was such a joy to share them with my dad while he was still alive. He helped me identify many faces. As the youngest of his siblings, though, there were some ancestors he couldn’t quite place.

More recently, I worked with another cousin, the daughter of my Uncle Tom. We digitized her photos too, and I added them to my FOREVER account. That’s when the magic happened.

With all three collections together, I turned on FOREVER Facial Recognition. Suddenly, connections began to appear that we had never noticed before:

• A baby picture of my Uncle Tom matched similar images from Aunt Rose’s collection [Left].
• A baby photo in Aunt Mary’s collection was linked to a toddler picture in Uncle Tom’s [Right].

• My paternal grandparents showed up again and again with their grandchildren—children I had only ever known as adults.