Last weekend I got sucked into one of the most interesting and cool features of Picasa, Google’s Mac and PC application for organizing photos: facial recognition. Last year, my father began scanning all of the thousands of family photos that he has stored using a slide/negative scanner and a flatbed scanner for prints. I ended up coming home last Christmas after a family visit with 40+gig of digital imagery – and that’s roughly 1/3 of what he thinks he has left to digitize!

As soon as I got home, I simply dumped the collection into my Picasa albums folder and let the software crank through it. But only a few days ago did I stumble upon the facial recognition features of Picasa – and it opened up an totally unexpected world of family history for me. You see, in sorting through all of the faces and tagging them with names either from my already-imported contacts list or by adding new ones on the fly, I’ve begun to gain a deeper understanding of my family history. I’ve always known the basics, such as my grandparents and some aunts and uncles here and there. But putting names to the faces of people like my father’s aunt, sitting down to dinner dressed to the nines in the 1930′s with her dapper husband Jack, has just brought a whole new level of appreciation to where I’ve come from and how deep my roots – and my own growing family’s roots – are and will continue to be for generations to come. And yes, that’s my father leaning out of the back of that 1960′s Beetle, not me. Something about the apple falling somewhere in close proximity to the tree…