That’s what the genealogical site, MyHeritage.com, is now offering to do with your hold family photos. They’re using artificial intelligence to make photos of ancestors come alive long after their deaths.

The company’s first offering was to automatically enhance and colorize old black & white photos. That produced some very high quality results that were fun to look at.

Now they’ve gone a step further.

Do you sometimes wonder how your ancestors moved, smiled and looked in real life? You can now see your ancestors from generations past like never before!

We’re happy to introduce Deep Nostalgia™, a groundbreaking new photo feature on MyHeritage that allows you to animate the faces of your loved ones in still photos. This new addition to our suite of photo tools produces a realistic depiction of how a person from an old photo could have moved and looked if they were captured on video.

Of course, I had to try it out. And it’s mesmerizing…and creepy…at the same time.

I started with photos of my mom’s mother, my grandmother, Heleualani Yonge, and my mom’s grandmother on her dad’s side, Helene Francis Brittain Yonge.

Then I let MyHeritage do its thing.

Here are the results.

My grandmother, Lani Yonge.

My great-grandmother, Helene Brittain Yonge

I might try a photo of my late sister, and see how close they get to the person I remember. That might give a sense of how well they render these more distant family members.