Persons

Visual Ancestor enables members to identify persons in photographs and to record basic genealogical information about them, including relationships -- all of which can be used to build-out a family. This is another tool people can use to preserve their visual family history, to preserve basic genealogy of a family surrounding a collection of their photographs, and to enable others to potentially find their ancestors among your own set of contributed photographs.

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You may browse from all persons listed in the left pane, and when you select one, their information including a list of photographs in which they have been identified will appear here in the Person Viewer. For members who are logged in, your own identified persons (if you have any), and their photographs, will be listed right below this instruction as well as a button to create a new person.


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Instructions on Identifying Persons

In this video, we explain how to identify persons in a photograph as the fourth and final step in archiving a photograph or other artifact in the Visual Ancestor photograph library.
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Hello and welcome to visual ancestor and I'm the chief curator and in this video I am going to complete the process of archiving uploading photographs into a group that you've made on visual ancestor and the fourth step here in the process is step four identify persons. So, in case you're new to this video, you haven't done step one, two, and three, um, I would recommend that you do. Step one, upload our scans. Step two, archive the information. Step three, specify the photographer. But, um, if you're coming at this new, you had to walk away. You had to close things down and you initially log in. You can get to step four simply by first going to your group, which is just drop the pancakes down. You can click groups. You'll get the list of your groups here in the center. Click on the group you're working in. You get the list of photographs in that group. Go ahead and click on the photograph number and then uh you you're brought to the photograph view. You're still not there yet. So, you have to edit the photograph. Click on edit. You're automatically brought to step one, but we are going to skip forward to step four. So, I'm going to click on step four. In this step, we are able to identify up to 30 persons in the photograph. We're also able to click on each person and get kind of like a marker or a target with a number. And that number is going to correspond to the row number in a table that's going to build below. And that's how we're going to enter the identities of these persons. So, let's look at the photograph. And if you click on any of the people on the photograph, you'll be able to get kind of an ID target. So I'm going to click on the face of this guy. And as you can see, that kind of plants a target on his face. It says number one in it. I'm going to do the same thing for the second person. And I have the number two in that target. If I scroll down to the table that kind of builds below, you notice that row number two was added when I clicked on the second uh target. Um, in this table below, now I'm going to have some fields to either identify an existing person. If I've already um if I've already entered in a person, um I will be able to choose a person. And if I drop that down, as you can see, I have one, two, three, I have five people that I've already um entered into a visual ancestor. U but I can also, if I didn't, specify a brand new person. So let's uh specify some new people. So number one, row number one corresponds to target number one, which is the man. So let's suppose that this is my grandfather. I'm gonna call him George. Middle name uh Joseph um Brooks, let's just say. And then for person number two, um that's his wife. Let's say it's Annie Elizabeth Walker. Um I could do that. Um, I could I could also go Elizabeth Walker Brooks. Uh, however your particular style is putting the names of a married couple in there. I'm just going to leave it like that. If I leave it like that, if I go to an alphabetical listing of persons, I'm going to have to find Annie under the W's. I could also do something like uh Brooks Walker or Brooks-Walker. Again, whatever your particular style is. I'm just going to leave it like this. Um, the actual first entry notice is the set of coordinates that that target was placed on the photograph. Don't do anything with that. Just leave it as is. That automatically sets. And then lastly, for each person, and notice that I have a place where I can mark the determination, as we've already talked about in previous videos. So here I'm just going to leave this um at uh well let's just suppose that these are my great-grandparents and I didn't know their names until I did genealological research. Maybe my uh maybe my parents didn't even know. In that case I would select research. But um I did create kind of a story to guide us through the process of creating the group and also creating these photographs. And the story was, if you remember, this was a photograph in a box that was my grandparents and it was in the my father's attic that I found. So, kind of like following that theme, my my father may may have known that these were his his parents. So, um I'm just going to put personal information, personal knowledge, and I'm going to I'm going to leave the same for Annie there. Um, if I need to add a new row, I can click this button, add new row, and that'll just add more rows. I can also remove uh the latest row by clicking remove latest row, you know, just to keep my data orderly. Um, doesn't really do anything if it's blank. Uh, just leave it blank. If you accidentally click new row, doesn't really matter. All right, that completes it. Um, so now I am going to click on save and return and that's going to save this information and it's going to return me back to the photo view. Remember, just to repeat myself a little bit, if you already entered a photograph and identified George Brooks and Annie Walker, they would be present in this drop-down list, and you would choose their names here, and you would leave these fields blank because you're you're choosing a person you've already entered into the system. If you don't do that, you've already entered a person and you put their names here a second time with this existing person field being blank. You're going enter them a second time and you're going to have a duplicate. All right, so let's go ahead and press save and return. And now we're brought back to the photo view. We have a nice note up here saying saved uh identifying persons. And on a photo view, if I just scroll down a little bit, now that we've identified persons in this section, we have uh under persons, we actually have the little um little um cards or or little sections um that represent each person here in their name. I can also click on show ID targets. And when I click on show ID targets, um I'm just giving a visual heads up of what the targets are that correspond to the numbers of the persons down here. I can hide those targets again, make them go away. And that's a very helpful feature, not only for us, but for anyone who comes and views a public photograph for which there are identified persons. So, always remember that if you're in the library looking at a photograph, persons are identified, you can always click on show ID targets and just get a heads up at who's who. All right, that completes uh step four, which is identifying persons. I can always go back and edit this photograph. I'll click edit, and I can always go back through these steps one, two, three, and four, and change information all throughout here. Always remember though to save your information as you move on. Um that's it here and I hope you have a great time archiving photographs. Let us know um if you have any um recommendations or suggestions or difficulties. We want to hear about that. Thank you very much and have a nice day.


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Notes about Personal Identities

Visual Ancestor does not allow personal information and the identities of a living person to be published as part of our person identification feature. In addition, members must agree to share only photographs that they are entitled to share, are reasonably believed to be free of copyright (pre-WWII is a general rule), and that are not of anyone presently living -- at least not without their permission. Visual Ancestor reserves the right to remove any information that seems to not comply with these policies.

Notes about No Associated Photographs

The persons list displays all persons in our genealogical database -- those who are identified in photographs and those who are being used purely for their genealogical information to relate family members together. Not only so, but members can choose to make their photographs private. Therefore if there are no associated photographs for this person, it is either because there just are not any, or they are private.