The bigger the family the more essential it is to share pictures online. My aunt is now in the process of planning the king of all family reunions. We were all aware of the majority of our relatives in the United States and Germany, but my grandparents left Germany fifty years ago so almost all of the extended relatives have fallen out of touch.
After chasing our ancestry back a few hundred years she began to contact the widespread branches of our family. With a little organization of a photo sharing website we are able to see the others as they loaded up photos and tales of their families. At first I participated to help out my aunt on her project, but as it grew it became very interesting to see which family traits ran in the others.
When we are all together the family resemblance is more than obvious, but I was shocked to discover my second cousin’s two year old was nearly identical to my own son. And I have a great uncle that could easily be confused with Kenny Rogers. At first I had no interest in the giant gathering of people that may share a bit of DNA with me, but as more and more people became involved in the website the more I was interested in meeting them.
This past weekend I went to stay at my brother’s house while he celebrated his birthday and while we hung out I showed him how to load up photos of his family. I even leant him my gorillapod when he went hiking which resulted in two great shots of both him and his son atop Panther Mountain in the Adirondacks where they had gone hiking.
I was even able to use photo stitching with the other mountaintop pictures that he took to put them in the center of a vast cloudy panorama. Sometimes it is the easiest photo edits that result in the most gorgeous pictures. Posting that picture to the family website got many comments, a few even requiring a translation.
It just goes to show how much the internet is bringing people together. Just a few years ago many of us would never have heard of the others, unless it was my grandmother recounting the nameless, faceless grandchildren of her siblings. Now we are a bigger family than ever and soon lots of us will meet for the first time, all due to a little photo networking.
Christy Higby
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