WHO COULD THEY BE? — Sharon Mark Cohen, MPA, UN Representative for IHAN

In February 2026, Cousin Paula sent me a photo with a note stating, “Don’t know these people.” I suppose that, as the family historian, she thought I might know them or be the one to discover who they were.

Unfortunately, I also don’t know the woman or the child. Instantly, however, I thought the man was my father, and that photo was probably taken around 1939.

After I sent a copy to my cousin Shari and my brothers, Shari immediately agreed. My brother Stu was not readily on board, but when I showed Al, he also agreed it was our father. He said he’s standing on a step above the woman in the picture, which makes him look taller. That discovery squelched Stu’s reservation. Nate agreed.

The next thing I did was to email a copy of the picture to my cousin living in California. See “May the Connections Never End,” dated October 22, 2024, at sharonmarkcohen.com. I was hoping he would get a copy to his 95-year-old mother, who lives in an assisted living facility in New Jersey. She’s our eldest living relative. Knowing it was a long shot, I thought she might identify the woman and child in the photo or recognize the store, since the signage read only “Department Store.”

Several months passed, and I kept the picture out on our counter. One day, I said to my husband, “Let’s visit Cynthia today, and I’ll bring that picture and see if she recognizes the people in it, or the storefront.” We took the nearby trip and found Cynthia engaged in the social hall, participating in current events.

We walked back to her room, caught up on family chatter, and then I pulled out the picture hoping she would recognize someone or something. That was a lost dream. While we didn’t get the answer we were hoping for, we had a delightful hour-and-a-half visit with our most senior cousin.

This story makes me think of all the years I spent collecting printed photos and writing names and dates on the backs of those pictures. Now, in the digital era, dates are captured for us, and even resemblances to a person are automatically placed. It’s like a miracle.

My next step may be to put the picture into a machine to see whether our guesses are correct. It will be interesting to see what Artificial Intelligence (“AI,” not my brother AL) has to say.

Stay tuned. This is an interesting project. I’m pretty certain I can find out whether the man definitely is my father by adding more photos of him and asking the computer to decide if I am correct.

The woman and the child in the photo, however, may be impossible to identify without any clues to their identities or other pictures to compare. I’ll keep trying, and with the help of social media, I may still make that unexpected discovery.