I have tried various ways to make pedigrees, with various goals in mind. Personal Ancestry Writer, the free genealogy program I am using, will output an astonishing variety of formats, and I have used it extensively on this site. I also got interested in constructing my own custom format, for which purpose I used a rather elderly version of Adobe's InDesign page layout program, from back in the days when it was a program and not a suite, and the user group whose newsletter I edited could actually afford to buy it. In order to make a custom pedigree, with more generations displayed than PAW will do on a single page, I also used Adobe Photoshop CS1 to stitch several different page outputs together. To see a full sized image, and download if you wish, just click on the thumbnail.
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Here's the most recent complete pedigree image, culminating with, well, me. It is fairly large, 1440 pixels by 1080 pixels, so displayed at full size it should actually be legible, provided you have excellent eyesight or a good pair of glasses. I know, it is a bit messy looking, which is why I built the next set of images. What they lack in information, they make up in clarity. |
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This pedigree of my father is based on the tree I constructed with InDesign. Even building something with a basic tabloid page format, in order to have a type face that was legible I found I was limited to five generations. With a bit of cheating, and a trip into Photoshop, I was able to get seven generations on one lineage, but there was no alternative really but to drop the lineage from James Isham Hollingsworth back into the 17th century. Ah well. As long as I was in Photoshop anyway, I decided to add some photos. Depending on your monitor's resolution you may be able to see, and read, the whole thing, it is 1025x1146 pixels. |
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Here's the same sort of thing, done with my mother's pedigree. This time just a little tiny bit of fudging in Photoshop enabled me to get six generations, and all her ancestors thus far known to me, in a single image. If you have a fair sized monitor you should be able to see the whole thing, and read the text--the full sized image is 868x922 pixels. |