How AI Identified My Nineteenth Century Mystery Portrait

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If you’ve been at this a while, you’ve probably become the family receptacle for old photographs. Maybe you even ask your relatives to send you the contents of their attics. I sympathize.

The Mystery Man. Do you recognize him already? You just might. He turned out to be quite a big name. But I didn’t know to ask you, did I?

Now, you’d think that someone back there in your family tree could have taken a few seconds out of her busy day trying not to set her hoop skirt on fire to scribble down a few names. But she usually didn’t. My pet theory is that most people prefer not to contemplate their own deaths. You see, as long as you’re around, there’s no need to identify every single person in your photo albums. Of course that’s Uncle Albie. Everyone knows that.

Yeah, everyone alive in 1905. But nowadays, no one alive in 1905 is alive now. So no one knows that. Label your photos!

I have a few dozen unidentified portraits. So many that you might say one of my hobbies is trying to identify people from old portraits. It scratches that same Sherlock Holmes itch as genealogy itself.

Thanks to AI image recognition and a reverse image search, one of those unidentifieds just got a name.