In an interesting twist on family tree research a new Web site is employing facial-recognition technology to analyze your facial features and match you up with potential relatives. While the most popular feature of the site is the fun "Find the Celebrity in You" tool which matches your facial traits to find the celebrities you most closely resemble, there are a lot of other nice tools for genealogists.

Here's how it works: Head to myheritage.com, an Israeli-based Web site devoted to genealogy research. After a quick sign-up, you upload a picture of yourself or a family member onto the site and select whether you want to only search celebrity photos, or include all uploaded photos (which should hopefully soon include a lot of great heritage photos). After a minute or so of scanning it presents you with photos of one or more people, assigning a percentage to the resemblance. Some people swear the tool is uncanny, but it told me I resemble Rupert Grint (the actor who plays Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies), so I don't know :}

While the celebrity element is a fun added feature, the real focus of the site is on genealogy, helping people put together family trees. The site plans to launch a database of old family photos soon, helping people to identify relatives through facial recognition. They also have an amazingly powerful genealogy search engine (it worked very well in my tests), and free FamilyBuilder software (with support for multiple languages) which is still in development but available for download. Future plans include MyHeritage Family Pages (which are planned to go live in April) for creating a family site of your own. For now everything is free, but since most of the site is still under development, I bet this will probably change down the road. For now there isn't much useful information yet, but the genealogy search works pretty well and the facial recognition tool is a fun way to pass some time!