Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Tombstone Tuesday's Tip - Use Google Images to Find Family Photos

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This week's Tuesday Tip is to:  Use Google Images to find family photos in online collections.

Google has an Images page at http://www.google.com/imghp that can find almost any image online (it seems that way!) if you do a search. 

I did some research several years ago for my aunt's husband's family - the Remleys.  I recently added that database to my ancestral database so that all of the spouses of my aunts and uncles are in it, so I went searching for images of Remley people and gravestones and whatever else I could find. 

A search for [remley cemetery] in Google Images brought up over 3,000 images:


On later pages, there is a collection of cemetery photographs from many cemeteries in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, where my uncle Jim Remley grew up.  I found a wonderful gravestone picture of his paternal grandparents:


 I contacted the photographer and he sent some images to me, including this one - surprise - Uncle Jim's gravestone too!  


Jim is right in front of the gravestone of his father and step-mother (the photographer has done a magnificent job in Lawrence County!).  I had forgotten that he was to be buried in Lawrence county PA.

Since Blogger puts images uploaded in Blogger-based blogs (including Genea-Musings) into PicasaWeb albums, and other people save their family images in free PicasaWeb albums, there are thousands (probably millions) of family pictures, gravestone pictures, newspaper clippings, documents, etc. available online. 

There are other images that Google finds on web pages in a Google Image search.  And, yes, they do have copyright protection. 

The major problem is, of course, that not all of them have captions or metadata associated with them, so it's a bit of a mess to find specific people. 

It is also Tombstone Tuesday, so I captured two daily blogging meme's in one post!

1 comment:

familytwigs said...

As always, Randy, great post. I had not thought of using Google images in that way. Thanks!