Paper, pen and family tree.

[Mairi]

I wonder how many people are recording family trees by hand on paper.
Despite installing programmes on the computer a long while ago, I prefer drawing a tree after research, or rather what seems like hundreds of little branches which I check again and again before adding to 'my' tree.

A couple of weeks back I bought a very large sheet of watercolour paper and set about drawing my friend's tree on her father's side. The hours and hours of research had been fascinating as I sorted out the folk, families, farms and forbears.

Measurements taken, lines ruled and spaces checked, I pencilled in names, dates, places and occupations. Then I reached for my fountain pen, always my favourite for writing, and endeavoured to produce neat italic writing. I say endeavoured because arthritis affects my hand control now. Needless to say I held my breath most of the time! Deleting was not an option.
Decisions, decisions. The names were in black ink. Should the dates be in red, I wondered. The occupations in another colour? No, I decided, highlighting the dates would look as if they were more important than the people so I did them all in black. What would I underline?

In between these hesitations I searched my books for examples of drawn trees but could not find any.

A visit to The Scottish Genealogy Society in Victoria Terrace would no doubt be a great help but is difficult. Does anyone know of a book, on genealogy or calligraphy, which shows examples of lay-outs, etc?

I do know how to define the main lines of descent and how to embellish letters but would like to study different styles of presentation.

My thoughts are now on the spaces! A border? What kind? Something geometric or a pattern of oat stalks to signify the farming links! Cartwheels, cows, a croft perhaps? Watercolour illustrations would be nice.

Oh dear, more scope to make a mistake and spoil that tree. Perhaps plain is best!

Is/has anyone engaged in similar effort?
Mairi.

[Currie]

Hello Mairi,

If you search in Google Images you’ll find lots of interesting arrangements, some quite bizarre. I’m not sure that there’s anything inspirational there but it might be worth a look. There may be more in the smaller image sizes.

http://images.google.com.au/images?q=%2 ... imgsz=huge

Alan

[Pandabean]

Mairi,

That sounds interesting. You must have alot of patience to do that. I know for a fact if it was me I would be to worried about making a mistake and messing the whole thing up.

I hope that it goes well and you get the end result you want.

[Currie]

A couple of interesting trees.

http://www.tarvinfamily.org/images/thoroughgood-72.gif

http://www.dayanofaleppo.org/images/Dayan_6_17_sm.jpg

Alan

[SarahND]

Wow
Those trees are amazing, Alan! I think it would take some study to actually follow the relationships in that huge Tarvin tree! But it's beautiful.
Regards,
Sarah

[Bervonian]

Hello Mairi,
I have drawn out family trees for friends in the past but when my own, having 86 names, became too large I decided on a different approach.
I typed the names in font size 8, and printed them out. The next stage was to cut them out with a small border then rule a large sheet of paper with horizontal lines 1.5 inches apart. I then juggled the names until the spacing looked OK and gummed them on. Finally, I took the finished tree to a firm in Aberdeen who can do large printouts and had several copies made. An individual name looks like this:

David
Master Plasterer.
bap. 1839 Bervie.
m. 1866 Adelaide, S.Australia,
Johanna Glencross
d. 1910 Montrose.

The large sheet of paper measures 88.8 cm x 40.2 cm. There are 8 generations, and the number of names in each generation is as follws:
Generation 1 - 2 names
" 2 - 8 "
" 3 - 3 "
" 4 - 12 "
" 5 - 22 "
" 6 - 26 "
" 7 - 10 "
" 8 - 3 "
I hope this long winded reply ( ) will be of some interest.

Isles.

[Mairi]

Thank you all so much for your responses! They are a great help.
Not able to reply fully tonight but hope to soon.
Mairi.