There’s a peculiar human desire to reconnect with their past by looking for clues in family trees. Did you get that sass from Great-Aunt Edna, who, to her dying day, declined to share her prized German Potato Salad recipe? Did you get those baby blue eyes from your Mom’s side of the family? In a country like the US, shaped by waves of immigration and where people tend to move frequently in search of opportunity, it’s easy to lose track of where we came from in pursuit of where we are going (next).
Recently I’ve been digging through archives to flesh out my family’s genealogical history a bit, using the interesting software offered by Ancestry.com, a company that helps you build out your family tree. One thing I found was photos attached to the tree are few and far between - they are a pain to scan and upload, and these paper fragments often are damaged. For this reason I’ve been happy to experiment with ways to upscale and enhance these images using AI - and I discovered a little key to the past while doing so!
I also found that my ninth great-grandmother was the famous Rebecca Nurse Towne, hanged as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s. So there’s that.
Sample of what family trees look like on Ancestry.com
Something Old, Something New
While digging through Ancestry’s pages, I discovered an image I hadn’t seen before of my Great Grandparents, Elmer Dove and Blanche Bartlett Dove:
While the image is pretty crisp, I put it through a workflow that I built to help my research: enhancing the images using AI to get a few more details from them. To do this, I used Goose, a new tool by Block to interface with LLMs and MCP servers so that you can simply do your work locally without battling tooling. This was exactly what I needed to enhance the images I found on Ancestry right from a desktop app, chatting with Goose via Gemini, my LLM of choice. Cloudinary’s MCP servers work very well with Goose; here’s how to start using them.
To get setup to use Goose with Cloudinary’s MCPs, there are a few steps:
Download Goose for free and take a look at how it interfaces with Cloudinary’s MCP servers: https://block.github.io/goose/docs/mcp/cloudinary-asset-management-mcp/
Install the Cloudinary extension by searching for Cloudinary at https://block.github.io/goose/extensions/ and pressing ‘install’.
Add your Cloudinary URL to the extension’s settings (find the URL by going to the console in Cloudinary and looking for the API key section, where the URL is listed:
CLOUDINARY_URL=cloudinary://<your_api_key>:<your_api_secret>@<your_account_name>.For ease of upload, I added an upload preset so that all the images in this task will go to a specific folder.
Configure your LLM of choice using an appropriate API key as outlined by Goose (I use Gemini)
Now you can start chatting with Goose via your LLM. Tell it to upload images straight from Ancestry paths (which you can get by right-clicking on an image in Ancestry) and transform them to bring these pictures into better focus.
I was amazed by the image quality, and even learned something about Great-Grandfather Elmer:
With this enhanced image, my eye was caught by the little silver axe pinned to the lapel. Some research using ChatGPT found that this signifies membership in the ‘Modern Woodmen’ Association, a proto life-insurance type organization still in existence that pooled members’ assets in case of death, so that the widow would be taken care of. Given that this photo was taken in the 1890s in Nebraska, and documentation mentions his membership in this organization, this checks out, but I never would have made the connection without the little symbol that shows clearly in the enhanced photo. It’s delightful to see these little humanizing elements pop out from the past. Also that’s a cool moustache.
Next I tried a transformation of my formidable Great Grandmother Schoenleber, née Isermann, on the other side of the family. This lady went on to be the mother of twelve, including a set of twins, one of whom was my Grandfather. German farm wives do not mess around. I was thrilled to use Goose and the Cloudinary MCP server to go from this grainy photo…
…to this with some AI enhancement, restoration and brightening, with her amazing spit curls, elaborate lace and earrings on full display:
In conclusion, it’s a wonderful experience to “speak” to your ancestors via these old photographs. Using an MCP server allows you to get tooling out of the way and simply interface with an AI agent that will let you see your past just a little more clearly.
About me: I'm the Director of Developer Relations at Cloudinary. Stay tuned for esoteric demos and sign up to enjoy the generous free tier of this top-notch image and video platform!
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