I hope that some of you had fun with Jigsaw Explorer earlier in the week. It is a very powerful tool for converting almost any image into an online puzzle, but how is that useful for family history? You could claim that the old photos are sort of relevant but even that is a bit of stretch.
But what if the image that needed to be reconstructed was a portion of your family tree and you could send the link to other family members (especially the grandchildren you are trying to convince to follow your path as the keeper of the family story)? Where can you get that image? Make it yourself: it is surprisingly easy.
Go to https://jigex.com/4bDo to see what I was able to come up with. Legacy Charting gave me the basic tree but leaves some empty corners which are not good in jigsaws. It was easy to fill them with a title and a picture of the target person in Irfanview. And that tool also has a great facility to automatically add a border (which makes finding edge pieces easier).
If you do try out my puzzle, remember that the blue rectangle in the centre of screen when it opens will let you change the number of pieces. Just click on the grid on the left end before you click OK on the right. It opens by default with 72 pieces which took me 13 minutes to assemble (and I reckon I know that tree!) So perhaps try a smaller number of bigger pieces to get a feel for the puzzle before you launch into the 1000 piece version.
But what if the image that needed to be reconstructed was a portion of your family tree and you could send the link to other family members (especially the grandchildren you are trying to convince to follow your path as the keeper of the family story)? Where can you get that image? Make it yourself: it is surprisingly easy.
Go to https://jigex.com/4bDo to see what I was able to come up with. Legacy Charting gave me the basic tree but leaves some empty corners which are not good in jigsaws. It was easy to fill them with a title and a picture of the target person in Irfanview. And that tool also has a great facility to automatically add a border (which makes finding edge pieces easier).
If you do try out my puzzle, remember that the blue rectangle in the centre of screen when it opens will let you change the number of pieces. Just click on the grid on the left end before you click OK on the right. It opens by default with 72 pieces which took me 13 minutes to assemble (and I reckon I know that tree!) So perhaps try a smaller number of bigger pieces to get a feel for the puzzle before you launch into the 1000 piece version.