Riverbend Journal

  Above is the only picture I have for my 2nd great grandparents Ira and Maria when they were young. I have a picture or two near the end of their life that are actual photos. The one above is merely a facsimile of a photo that is on one of the pages of a family history book that was given to my grandmother and I eventually inherited.  I don't recall if it credits who has the original photo because it has been a couple decades since I read through it last but I'm pretty sure even if it did, it would be a time consuming task to track down if it exists today and who has it.  So based upon this information and my last experiment using A.I. to fix old photographs, I thought I would try it on this facsimile and see what happens. I loaded up the picture and gave the following command to Nano Banana Pro in Google Gemini: restore and increase resolution. I am just gobsmacked at this result. It didn't remove the "tape" or whatever is across the top but other than that, it ...

As I mentioned in my last post, the death of Jeanne and my attendance of the funeral made me want to to update my family tree with names and a new death date. As I was looking at Jeanne's youngest daughter's page, it had numerous hints and many of those hints were of high school pictures. I remember my mom talk fondly of Jeanne's daughter and knew they were good friends so it shouldn't have been a surprise that my mom was in nearly every single picture too. It was kind of a neat trip down memory lane that I thought I would share. Above is a picture of the Honor Society and my mom is second from the left in the front row sitting down and Jeanne's daughter is third from the left sitting down. Above it the Drama Club and again, my mother is the girl in the very back row in the center with blonde hair and Jeanne's daughter is immediately to the right in the dark colored dress. Above is the softball team and my mom is the very left one in the back row and this time, ...

  I met "Tex" from a distance soon after my mom married my dad and we moved down to the farm. Tex was driving a tractor in the field across the gravel road from our house without a shirt on and was extremely obese. As the tractor bounced across the rough field, so did the fat and I was horrified in the same way one sees a wreck about the happen. You know it isn't pretty but you can't look away. Tex and his wife Jeanne were one of the many casualties soon afterwards due to the farm crisis in the early 80's.  I don't know if they sold their farm as a result, but they moved to the "big city" where I now reside and managed a landmark inn in town that still exists though I don't think it is in business anymore. I have memories of visiting them at the inn while my grandparents, who were close friends of theirs, visited. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the managers area behind the front desk watching "The Man From Snowy River" and sippi...

  After my recent post about using A.I. to edit a photo to replace humans with goats, it got me thinking about the possibility of using A.I. to restore some of my favorite genealogy photos. However, before I could attempt one, my blogging Canadian friend AC did exactly that and also using the same A.I. that I had used for the goat trail photo called Nano Banana Pro which is linked through Google's Gemini A.I. Seeing his success, made me sit down and make the time to restore a photo and the one I chose is the one above.  It is an inherited photo from my grandparents taken when they were dating. When I received it, it has been folded a bit causing the broken white lines across the upper portions of the photo but was in fair shape overall. Above is the result that I obtained after scanning it using my flatbed scanner and doing some minor altering such as cropping off the photo edges and adjusting the contrast a bit. So I uploaded it to Gemini and per AC's post, simply typed in t...

  One consideration I hadn't considered in trading vehicles was the step height to enter the vehicle. I'm six feet two inches tall with longer legs than average so for me, it wasn't a problem in the slightest. However for my vertically challenged wife and mother-in-law, the latter closing in on 80 years old at a fast clip, it was a harder affair. I looked at the options of carrying around a step stool and acting like a butler every time they wanted to enter or exit the vehicle or running boards and decided on the latter. I priced out the running boards and they weren't bad however to have a professional installed them would cost me around $700. After watching a video, I decided I could probably to the installation myself and save that $700 for something else.  The running boards came as a kit which essentially was the running boards themselves, bolts to mount them and a set of installation directions. The directions were pretty short and after previously watching a vide...