July 12, 2024
Periodically, I check online family trees for members of my family. Many online trees are available for free at websites such as Family Search, Ancestry and My Heritage. These trees are not static and change frequently. I often find new information and pictures on the various trees. It’s also a good way to find new cousins who are researching my families.
The information on these trees always needs to be verified, but they can lead to some surprising breakthroughs on difficult lines. I especially enjoy finding new-to-me family pictures on the trees. Recently, I found photos of a set of great grandparents on Family Search Family Tree. It was the first photos of them I’d ever seen. I’d never realized how closely my mother and several of her sisters resembled their grandmother. I’d heard family stories about my grandfather favoring one of my aunts since she looked like his mother. The photos proved that this story was true, adding a new dimension to my family tree.
However, recently, I’ve noticed many of the pictures posted on various family trees are colorized. Most photos taken before the late 1940s were not originally in color. Thanks to technology it is easy to click a button and have these old photos instantly change from black and white to color. Lots of people routinely do it. I have done it myself, and it is a fun way to give photos new life.
I have no problem with colorized photos. I do wish that folks wouldn’t post them on family trees without the accompanying black and white original. I know from personal experience that colorized photos are not accurate. It’s difficult to determine what color clothing is in a black and white picture. A light shade could be pale yellow, green, blue, lavender or even white. A darker shade could be black, but it might just as easily be dark blue or green.
Hair and eye color are equally impossible to determine from a black and white photo. Paler eyes may be blue, but they might be light brown or hazel. I suspect that computers use statistics to determine eye color. Since more people have brown eyes, brown is probably the default color in colorization programs.
Real people don’t necessarily follow these patterns. For example, I come from a family where nearly everyone has blue eyes. The shades vary from deep navy to steel blue. There are also redheads in our family. I have lots of photos of my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and even my siblings that were taken when black and white was the norm.
I’ve colorized many of them, but I’d never post the colorized versions. I knew many of these family members, and I know which ones had red hair and blue eyes. All the colorized photos I have produced show these family members with brown hair and brown eyes. If I posted the colorized versions of my pictures, I would be misleading anyone who looked at them.
Unless you know for sure that a colorized photo is accurate (few are), don’t put them on a family tree. If you must, then make sure to label them as colorized. Otherwise, you’re perpetuating myths about your family. It’s no different than putting an unsourced fact such as a date on a tree. Serious genealogists don’t do it.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society